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The process of discovery requires active exploration -- the act of collecting new and informative data. However, efficient autonomous exploration remains a major unsolved problem. The dominant paradigm addresses this challenge by using…
Scalable and effective exploration remains a key challenge in reinforcement learning (RL). While there are methods with optimality guarantees in the setting of discrete state and action spaces, these methods cannot be applied in…
The goal of meta-reinforcement learning (meta-RL) is to build agents that can quickly learn new tasks by leveraging prior experience on related tasks. Learning a new task often requires both exploring to gather task-relevant information and…
Reinforcement learning agents need exploratory behaviors to escape from local optima. These behaviors may include both immediate dithering perturbation and temporally consistent exploration. To achieve these, a stochastic policy model that…
One of the challenges in online reinforcement learning (RL) is that the agent needs to trade off the exploration of the environment and the exploitation of the samples to optimize its behavior. Whether we optimize for regret, sample…
We propose Deterministic Sequencing of Exploration and Exploitation (DSEE) algorithm with interleaving exploration and exploitation epochs for model-based RL problems that aim to simultaneously learn the system model, i.e., a Markov…
In online reinforcement learning (RL), efficient exploration remains particularly challenging in high-dimensional environments with sparse rewards. In low-dimensional environments, where tabular parameterization is possible, count-based…
Reinforcement learning (RL) is one of the three basic paradigms of machine learning. It has demonstrated impressive performance in many complex tasks like Go and StarCraft, which is increasingly involved in smart manufacturing and…
Incomplete knowledge of the environment leads an agent to make decisions under uncertainty. One of the major dilemmas in Reinforcement Learning (RL) where an autonomous agent has to balance two contrasting needs in making its decisions is:…
The exploration--exploitation trade-off in reinforcement learning (RL) is a well-known and much-studied problem that balances greedy action selection with novel experience, and the study of exploration methods is usually only considered in…
Exploration algorithms for reinforcement learning typically replace or augment the reward function with an additional ``intrinsic'' reward that trains the agent to seek previously unseen states of the environment. Here, we consider an…
Maximum entropy reinforcement learning motivates agents to explore states and actions to maximize the entropy of some distribution, typically by providing additional intrinsic rewards proportional to that entropy function. In this paper, we…
In actor-critic-based reinforcement learning algorithms such as Twin Delayed Deep Deterministic policy gradient (TD3), insufficient exploration of the spatial space can result in suboptimal policies when controlling 7-DOF robotic arms. To…
In the Reinforcement Learning (RL) framework, the learning is guided through a reward signal. This means that in situations of sparse rewards the agent has to focus on exploration, in order to discover which action, or set of actions leads…
This paper presents a novel form of policy gradient for model-free reinforcement learning (RL) with improved exploration properties. Current policy-based methods use entropy regularization to encourage undirected exploration of the reward…
How to efficiently explore in reinforcement learning is an open problem. Many exploration algorithms employ the epistemic uncertainty of their own value predictions -- for instance to compute an exploration bonus or upper confidence bound.…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) is known to be often unsuccessful in environments with sparse extrinsic rewards. A possible countermeasure is to endow RL agents with an intrinsic reward function, or 'intrinsic motivation', which rewards the…
The Exploration-Exploitation tradeoff arises in Reinforcement Learning when one cannot tell if a policy is optimal. Then, there is a constant need to explore new actions instead of exploiting past experience. In practice, it is common to…
In deep reinforcement learning (RL) research, there has been a concerted effort to design more efficient and productive exploration methods while solving sparse-reward problems. These exploration methods often share common principles (e.g.,…
The ability to explore efficiently and effectively is a central challenge of reinforcement learning. In this work, we consider exploration through the lens of information theory. Specifically, we cast exploration as a problem of maximizing…