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Bayesian optimization is a sequential method for minimizing objective functions that are expensive to evaluate and about which few assumptions can be made. By using all gathered data to train a Gaussian process model for the function and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-07 Jesse Schneider , William J. Welch

Complex robot navigation and control problems can be framed as policy search problems. However, interactive learning in uncertain environments can be expensive, requiring the use of data-efficient methods. Bayesian optimization is an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-29 Javier Garcia-Barcos , Ruben Martinez-Cantin

Exploration in environments with sparse rewards has been a persistent problem in reinforcement learning (RL). Many tasks are natural to specify with a sparse reward, and manually shaping a reward function can result in suboptimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-02-27 Ashvin Nair , Bob McGrew , Marcin Andrychowicz , Wojciech Zaremba , Pieter Abbeel

Temporal abstractions in the form of options have been shown to help reinforcement learning (RL) agents learn faster. However, despite prior work on this topic, the problem of discovering options through interaction with an environment…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-16 Vivek Veeriah , Tom Zahavy , Matteo Hessel , Zhongwen Xu , Junhyuk Oh , Iurii Kemaev , Hado van Hasselt , David Silver , Satinder Singh

Efficient exploration remains a challenging problem in reinforcement learning, especially for those tasks where rewards from environments are sparse. A commonly used approach for exploring such environments is to introduce some "intrinsic"…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-16 Neale Ratzlaff , Qinxun Bai , Li Fuxin , Wei Xu

Solving sparse reward tasks through exploration is one of the major challenges in deep reinforcement learning, especially in three-dimensional, partially-observable environments. Critically, the algorithm proposed in this article uses a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-06-18 Gabriele Libardi , Gianni De Fabritiis

The explore{exploit dilemma is one of the central challenges in Reinforcement Learning (RL). Bayesian RL solves the dilemma by providing the agent with information in the form of a prior distribution over environments; however, full…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-03-19 Jonathan Sorg , Satinder Singh , Richard L. Lewis

Bayesian optimization is a methodology for global optimization of unknown and expensive objectives. It combines a surrogate Bayesian regression model with an acquisition function to decide where to evaluate the objective. Typical regression…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-04 Afonso Eduardo , Michael U. Gutmann

We propose practical extensions to Bayesian optimization for solving dynamic problems. We model dynamic objective functions using spatiotemporal Gaussian process priors which capture all the instances of the functions over time. Our…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-03-12 Favour M. Nyikosa , Michael A. Osborne , Stephen J. Roberts

This paper investigates the automatic exploration problem under the unknown environment, which is the key point of applying the robotic system to some social tasks. The solution to this problem via stacking decision rules is impossible to…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-07-24 Haoran Li , Qichao Zhang , Dongbin Zhao

Numerous past works have tackled the problem of task-driven navigation. But, how to effectively explore a new environment to enable a variety of down-stream tasks has received much less attention. In this work, we study how agents can…

Robotics · Computer Science 2019-03-06 Tao Chen , Saurabh Gupta , Abhinav Gupta

We propose a novel holistic approach for safe autonomous exploration and map building based on constrained Bayesian optimisation. This method finds optimal continuous paths instead of discrete sensing locations that inherently satisfy…

Robotics · Computer Science 2017-03-02 Gilad Francis , Lionel Ott , Roman Marchant , Fabio Ramos

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

In practice, the parameters of control policies are often tuned manually. This is time-consuming and frustrating. Reinforcement learning is a promising alternative that aims to automate this process, yet often requires too many experiments…

In robotics, methods and softwares usually require optimizations of hyperparameters in order to be efficient for specific tasks, for instance industrial bin-picking from homogeneous heaps of different objects. We present a developmental…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-07-31 Maxime Petit , Emmanuel Dellandrea , Liming Chen

All reinforcement learning algorithms must handle the trade-off between exploration and exploitation. Many state-of-the-art deep reinforcement learning methods use noise in the action selection, such as Gaussian noise in policy gradient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-04-05 Trevor Barron , Oliver Obst , Heni Ben Amor

Numerous heuristics and advanced approaches have been proposed for exploration in different settings for deep reinforcement learning. Noise-based exploration generally fares well with dense-shaped rewards and bonus-based exploration with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-22 Sebastian Griesbach , Carlo D'Eramo

The objective of a reinforcement learning agent is to discover better actions through exploration. However, typical exploration techniques aim to maximize rewards, often incurring high costs in both exploration and learning processes. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-24 Akane Tsuboya , Yu Kono , Tatsuji Takahashi

Local optimization presents a promising approach to expensive, high-dimensional black-box optimization by sidestepping the need to globally explore the search space. For objective functions whose gradient cannot be evaluated directly,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-18 Quan Nguyen , Kaiwen Wu , Jacob R. Gardner , Roman Garnett

Reinforcement learning (RL) often struggles to accomplish a sparse-reward long-horizon task in a complex environment. Goal-conditioned reinforcement learning (GCRL) has been employed to tackle this difficult problem via a curriculum of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-20 Lisheng Wu , Ke Chen