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Related papers: ExTra: Transfer-guided Exploration

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Transfer learning can be applied in deep reinforcement learning to accelerate the training of a policy in a target task by transferring knowledge from a policy learned in a related source task. This is commonly achieved by copying…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-22 Joseph Campbell , Yue Guo , Fiona Xie , Simon Stepputtis , Katia Sycara

Reinforcement learning requires interaction with an environment, which is expensive for robots. This constraint necessitates approaches that work with limited environmental interaction by maximizing the reuse of previous experiences. We…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-04-05 Benedict Quartey , Ankit Shah , George Konidaris

Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents often struggle with inefficient exploration, particularly in environments with sparse rewards. Traditional exploration strategies can lead to slow learning and suboptimal performance because agents fail to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Gaurav Chaudhary , Laxmidhar Behera , Washim Uddin Mondal

Expert Iteration (ExIt) is an effective framework for learning game-playing policies from self-play. ExIt involves training a policy to mimic the search behaviour of a tree search algorithm - such as Monte-Carlo tree search - and using the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-02 Dennis J. N. J. Soemers , Éric Piette , Matthew Stephenson , Cameron Browne

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.,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-04 Jonathan C. Balloch , Rishav Bhagat , Geigh Zollicoffer , Ruoran Jia , Julia Kim , Mark O. Riedl

Equipping artificial agents with useful exploration mechanisms remains a challenge to this day. Humans, on the other hand, seem to manage the trade-off between exploration and exploitation effortlessly. In the present article, we put…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-15 Marcel Binz , Eric Schulz

We present a representation-driven framework for reinforcement learning. By representing policies as estimates of their expected values, we leverage techniques from contextual bandits to guide exploration and exploitation. Particularly,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-23 Ofir Nabati , Guy Tennenholtz , Shie Mannor

Exploration in environments with sparse rewards remains a fundamental challenge in reinforcement learning (RL). Existing approaches such as curriculum learning and Go-Explore often rely on hand-crafted heuristics, while curiosity-driven…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Georgios Sotirchos , Zlatan Ajanović , Jens Kober

A major challenge in reinforcement learning is the design of exploration strategies, especially for environments with sparse reward structures and continuous state and action spaces. Intuitively, if the reinforcement signal is very scarce,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-15 Susan Amin , Maziar Gomrokchi , Hossein Aboutalebi , Harsh Satija , Doina Precup

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) faces significant challenges in addressing the hard-exploration problems in tasks with sparse or deceptive rewards and large state spaces. These challenges severely limit the practical application of DRL.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-03 Guojian Wang , Faguo Wu , Xiao Zhang , Ning Guo , Zhiming Zheng

Proximal Policy Optimization with Adaptive Exploration (axPPO) is introduced as a novel learning algorithm. This paper investigates the exploration-exploitation tradeoff within the context of reinforcement learning and aims to contribute…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-09 Andrei Lixandru

Massive practical works addressed by Deep Q-network (DQN) algorithm have indicated that stochastic policy, despite its simplicity, is the most frequently used exploration approach. However, most existing stochastic exploration approaches…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-22 Wenhui Huang , Cong Zhang , Jingda Wu , Xiangkun He , Jie Zhang , Chen Lv

Reinforcement learning allows solving complex tasks, however, the learning tends to be task-specific and the sample efficiency remains a challenge. We present Plan2Explore, a self-supervised reinforcement learning agent that tackles both…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-02 Ramanan Sekar , Oleh Rybkin , Kostas Daniilidis , Pieter Abbeel , Danijar Hafner , Deepak Pathak

Exploration is a difficult challenge in reinforcement learning and even recent state-of-the art curiosity-based methods rely on the simple epsilon-greedy strategy to generate novelty. We argue that pure random walks do not succeed to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-07-06 Fabio Pardo , Vitaly Levdik , Petar Kormushev

A recent body of work addresses safety constraints in explore-and-exploit systems. Such constraints arise where, for example, exploration is carried out by individuals whose welfare should be balanced with overall welfare. In this paper, we…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2020-06-09 Gal Bahar , Omer Ben-Porat , Kevin Leyton-Brown , Moshe Tennenholtz

Sparse reward environments are known to be challenging for reinforcement learning agents. In such environments, efficient and scalable exploration is crucial. Exploration is a means by which an agent gains information about the environment.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-11 Jacob Chmura , Hasham Burhani , Xiao Qi Shi

A variety of strategies have been proposed for overcoming local optimality in metaheuristic search. This paper examines characteristics of moves that can be exploited to make good decisions about steps that lead away from a local optimum…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-10-22 Fred Glover

Model-based reinforcement learning is a powerful tool, but collecting data to fit an accurate model of the system can be costly. Exploring an unknown environment in a sample-efficient manner is hence of great importance. However, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-27 Matthieu Blanke , Marc Lelarge

An effective approach to exploration in reinforcement learning is to rely on an agent's uncertainty over the optimal policy, which can yield near-optimal exploration strategies in tabular settings. However, in non-tabular settings that…

Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms aim to balance exploiting the current best strategy with exploring new options that could lead to higher rewards. Most common RL algorithms use undirected exploration, i.e., select random sequences of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-01 Bhavya Sukhija , Stelian Coros , Andreas Krause , Pieter Abbeel , Carmelo Sferrazza