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Sufficient exploration is paramount for the success of a reinforcement learning agent. Yet, exploration is rarely assessed in an algorithm-independent way. We compare the behavior of three data-based, offline exploration metrics described…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-30 Jakob J. Hollenstein , Sayantan Auddy , Matteo Saveriano , Erwan Renaudo , Justus Piater

This paper reviews exploration techniques in deep reinforcement learning. Exploration techniques are of primary importance when solving sparse reward problems. In sparse reward problems, the reward is rare, which means that the agent will…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-03 Pawel Ladosz , Lilian Weng , Minwoo Kim , Hyondong Oh

Encouraging exploration is a critical issue in deep reinforcement learning. We investigate the effect of initial entropy that significantly influences the exploration, especially at the earlier stage. Our main observations are as follows:…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-25 Sooyoung Jang , Hyung-Il Kim

Acquiring abilities in the absence of a task-oriented reward function is at the frontier of reinforcement learning research. This problem has been studied through the lens of empowerment, which draws a connection between option discovery…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-04 Víctor Campos , Alexander Trott , Caiming Xiong , Richard Socher , Xavier Giro-i-Nieto , Jordi Torres

Robotic navigation concerns the task in which a robot should be able to find a safe and feasible path and traverse between two points in a complex environment. We approach the problem of robotic navigation using reinforcement learning and…

Robotics · Computer Science 2019-06-18 Muhammad Usama , Dong Eui Chang

Exploration in high-dimensional, continuous spaces with sparse rewards is an open problem in reinforcement learning. Artificial curiosity algorithms address this by creating rewards that lead to exploration. Given a reinforcement learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-08 Alexander Nedergaard , Matthew Cook

The performance of learning-based control techniques crucially depends on how effectively the system is explored. While most exploration techniques aim to achieve a globally accurate model, such approaches are generally unsuited for systems…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-11 Alexandre Capone , Jonas Umlauft , Thomas Beckers , Armin Lederer , Sandra Hirche

Researchers have integrated exploration techniques into multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) algorithms, drawing on their remarkable success in deep reinforcement learning. Nonetheless, exploration in MARL presents a more substantial…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2023-06-13 Jian Tao , Yang Zhang , Yangkun Chen , Xiu Li

In this paper, we present a novel method for achieving dexterous manipulation of complex objects, while simultaneously securing the object without the use of passive support surfaces. We posit that a key difficulty for training such…

Unsupervised Reinforcement Learning (RL) aims to discover diverse behaviors that can accelerate the learning of downstream tasks. Previous methods typically focus on entropy-based exploration or empowerment-driven skill learning. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-18 Ting Xiao , Jiakun Zheng , Rushuai Yang , Kang Xu , Qiaosheng Zhang , Peng Liu , Chenjia Bai

We study the problem of exploration in Reinforcement Learning and present a novel model-free solution. We adopt an information-theoretical viewpoint and start from the instance-specific lower bound of the number of samples that have to be…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-02 Alessio Russo , Alexandre Proutiere

A key challenge to deploying reinforcement learning in practice is avoiding excessive (harmful) exploration in individual episodes. We propose a natural constraint on exploration -- \textit{uniformly} outperforming a conservative policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-27 Wanqiao Xu , Jason Yecheng Ma , Kan Xu , Hamsa Bastani , Osbert Bastani

Reinforcement learning algorithms typically necessitate extensive exploration of the state space to find optimal policies. However, in safety-critical applications, the risks associated with such exploration can lead to catastrophic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-28 Kaustubh Mani , Vincent Mai , Charlie Gauthier , Annie Chen , Samer Nashed , Liam Paull

Optimistic value estimates provide one mechanism for directed exploration in reinforcement learning (RL). The agent acts greedily with respect to an estimate of the value plus what can be seen as a value bonus. The value bonus can be…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-16 Abdul Wahab , Raksha Kumaraswamy , Martha White

What is a good exploration strategy for an agent that interacts with an environment in the absence of external rewards? Ideally, we would like to get a policy driving towards a uniform state-action visitation (highly exploring) in a minimum…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-20 Mirco Mutti , Marcello Restelli

In recent years, a number of reinforcement learning (RL) methods have been proposed to explore complex environments which differ across episodes. In this work, we show that the effectiveness of these methods critically relies on a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-06 Mikael Henaff , Roberta Raileanu , Minqi Jiang , Tim Rocktäschel

Efficient exploration is necessary to achieve good sample efficiency for reinforcement learning in general. From small, tabular settings such as gridworlds to large, continuous and sparse reward settings such as robotic object manipulation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-20 Zhaohan Daniel Guo , Emma Brunskill

Efficient exploration remains a challenging research problem in reinforcement learning, especially when an environment contains large state spaces, deceptive local optima, or sparse rewards. To tackle this problem, we present a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-10-30 Zhang-Wei Hong , Tzu-Yun Shann , Shih-Yang Su , Yi-Hsiang Chang , Chun-Yi Lee

Reinforcement learning (RL) agents improve through trial-and-error, but when reward is sparse and the agent cannot discover successful action sequences, learning stagnates. This has been a notable problem in training deep RL agents to…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-02-27 Evan Zheran Liu , Kelvin Guu , Panupong Pasupat , Tianlin Shi , Percy Liang

Exploration bonuses in reinforcement learning guide long-horizon exploration by defining custom intrinsic objectives. Several exploration objectives like count-based bonuses, pseudo-counts, and state-entropy maximization are non-stationary…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-24 Roger Creus Castanyer , Joshua Romoff , Glen Berseth