English
Related papers

Related papers: Directed Exploration for Reinforcement Learning

200 papers

Space exploration missions have seen use of increasingly sophisticated robotic systems with ever more autonomy. Deep learning promises to take this even a step further, and has applications for high-level tasks, like path planning, as well…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-09-16 Tamir Blum , William Jones , Kazuya Yoshida

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

The primary goal of reinforcement learning is to develop decision-making policies that prioritize optimal performance, frequently without considering safety. In contrast, safe reinforcement learning seeks to reduce or avoid unsafe behavior.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-17 Zahra Shahrooei , Ali Baheri

Sparse reward problems are one of the biggest challenges in Reinforcement Learning. Goal-directed tasks are one such sparse reward problems where a reward signal is received only when the goal is reached. One promising way to train an agent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-11-06 Ameet Deshpande , Srikanth Sarma , Ashutosh Jha , Balaraman Ravindran

We study an exploration method for model-free RL that generalizes the counter-based exploration bonus methods and takes into account long term exploratory value of actions rather than a single step look-ahead. We propose a model-free RL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-09-03 Min-hwan Oh , Garud Iyengar

Researchers have demonstrated that Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) is a powerful tool for finding policies that perform well on complex robotic systems. However, these policies are often unpredictable and can induce highly variable…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-03-08 Sean Gillen , Asutay Ozmen , Katie Byl

Exploration is critical to a reinforcement learning agent's performance in its given environment. Prior exploration methods are often based on using heuristic auxiliary predictions to guide policy behavior, lacking a mathematically-grounded…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-02 Lisa Lee , Benjamin Eysenbach , Emilio Parisotto , Eric Xing , Sergey Levine , Ruslan Salakhutdinov

This paper considers the problem of efficient exploration of unseen environments, a key challenge in AI. We propose a `learning to explore' framework where we learn a policy from a distribution of environments. At test time, presented with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-30 Hanjun Dai , Yujia Li , Chenglong Wang , Rishabh Singh , Po-Sen Huang , Pushmeet Kohli

With reinforcement learning, an agent could learn complex behaviors from high-level abstractions of the task. However, exploration and reward shaping remained challenging for existing methods, especially in scenarios where the extrinsic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-11 Jie Chen , Wenjun Xu

Learning complex robot behavior through interactions with the environment necessitates principled exploration. Effective strategies should prioritize exploring regions of the state-action space that maximize rewards, with optimistic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-12 Jasmine Bayrooti , Carl Henrik Ek , Amanda Prorok

We consider an autonomous exploration problem in which a range-sensing mobile robot is tasked with accurately mapping the landmarks in an a priori unknown environment efficiently in real-time; it must choose sensing actions that both curb…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-07-27 Fanfei Chen , John D. Martin , Yewei Huang , Jinkun Wang , Brendan Englot

Finding meaningful and accurate dense rewards is a fundamental task in the field of reinforcement learning (RL) that enables agents to explore environments more efficiently. In traditional RL settings, agents learn optimal policies through…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-05 Shuyuan Zhang

The class of deep deterministic off-policy algorithms is effectively applied to solve challenging continuous control problems. Current approaches commonly utilize random noise as an exploration method, which has several drawbacks, including…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-07 Igor Kuznetsov

Robots must know how to be gentle when they need to interact with fragile objects, or when the robot itself is prone to wear and tear. We propose an approach that enables deep reinforcement learning to train policies that are gentle, both…

In many predictive contexts (e.g., credit lending), true outcomes are only observed for samples that were positively classified in the past. These past observations, in turn, form training datasets for classifiers that make future…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-04 Vijay Keswani , Anay Mehrotra , L. Elisa Celis

In many dynamic robotic tasks, such as striking pucks into a goal outside the reachable workspace, the robot must first identify the relevant physical properties of the object for successful task execution, as it is unable to recover from…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-09-03 Marina Y. Aoyama , Joao Moura , Juan Del Aguila Ferrandis , Sethu Vijayakumar

Causal inference is crucial for humans to explore the world, which can be modeled to enable an agent to efficiently explore the environment in reinforcement learning. Existing research indicates that establishing the causality between…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-14 Yan Yu , Yaodong Yang , Zhengbo Lu , Chengdong Ma , Wengang Zhou , Houqiang Li

Efficient exploration is a crucial challenge in deep reinforcement learning. Several methods, such as behavioral priors, are able to leverage offline data in order to efficiently accelerate reinforcement learning on complex tasks. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-01 Marco Bagatella , Sammy Christen , Otmar Hilliges

Exploration in sparse reward reinforcement learning remains an open challenge. Many state-of-the-art methods use intrinsic motivation to complement the sparse extrinsic reward signal, giving the agent more opportunities to receive feedback…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-24 Jingwei Zhang , Niklas Wetzel , Nicolai Dorka , Joschka Boedecker , Wolfram Burgard

In order to compute near-optimal policies with policy-gradient algorithms, it is common in practice to include intrinsic exploration terms in the learning objective. Although the effectiveness of these terms is usually justified by an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-21 Adrien Bolland , Gaspard Lambrechts , Damien Ernst