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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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Kevin McKee , Eric Alt , Andrew Grebenisan , Mick van Gelderen , Gary Miguel

Several recent works have been dedicated to unsupervised reinforcement learning in a single environment, in which a policy is first pre-trained with unsupervised interactions, and then fine-tuned towards the optimal policy for several…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-17 Mirco Mutti , Mattia Mancassola , Marcello Restelli

How do you incentivize self-interested agents to $\textit{explore}$ when they prefer to $\textit{exploit}$? We consider complex exploration problems, where each agent faces the same (but unknown) MDP. In contrast with traditional…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-21 Max Simchowitz , Aleksandrs Slivkins

A key challenge in reinforcement learning (RL) is environment generalization: a policy trained to solve a task in one environment often fails to solve the same task in a slightly different test environment. A common approach to improve…

Robotics · Computer Science 2019-07-30 Wenxuan Zhou , Lerrel Pinto , Abhinav Gupta

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

Controllable Markov chains describe the dynamics of sequential decision making tasks and are the central component in optimal control and reinforcement learning. In this work, we give the general form of an optimal policy for learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-24 Peter N. Loxley

In this paper we consider the problem of how a reinforcement learning agent that is tasked with solving a sequence of reinforcement learning problems (a sequence of Markov decision processes) can use knowledge acquired early in its lifetime…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-02-05 Francisco M. Garcia , Philip S. Thomas

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become an increasingly active area of research in recent years. Although there are many algorithms that allow an agent to solve tasks efficiently, they often ignore the possibility that prior experience…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-01-07 Francisco M. Garcia , Chris Nota , Philip S. Thomas

We present a new model-based algorithm for reinforcement learning (RL) which consists of explicit exploration and exploitation phases, and is applicable in large or infinite state spaces. The algorithm maintains a set of dynamics models…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-03 Mikael Henaff

Training robotic policies in simulation suffers from the sim-to-real gap, as simulated dynamics can be different from real-world dynamics. Past works tackled this problem through domain randomization and online system-identification. The…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-11-09 Jacky Liang , Saumya Saxena , Oliver Kroemer

Real-world autonomous decision-making systems, from robots to recommendation engines, must operate in environments that change over time. While deep reinforcement learning (RL) has shown an impressive ability to learn optimal policies in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-16 Jonathan Clifford Balloch

Reinforcement learning (RL) has been successfully applied to solve the problem of finding obstacle-free paths for autonomous agents operating in stochastic and uncertain environments. However, when the underlying stochastic dynamics of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-29 Sheryl Paul , Jyotirmoy V. Deshmukh

In the era of deep reinforcement learning, making progress is more complex, as the collected experience must be compressed into a deep model for future exploitation and sampling. Many papers have shown that training a deep learning policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-05 Glen Berseth

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-09-10 Lior Shani , Yonathan Efroni , Shie Mannor

Exploration is essential for reinforcement learning (RL). To face the challenges of exploration, we consider a reward-free RL framework that completely separates exploration from exploitation and brings new challenges for exploration…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-11 Chuheng Zhang , Yuanying Cai , Longbo Huang , Jian Li

Efficient and robust policy transfer remains a key challenge for reinforcement learning to become viable for real-wold robotics. Policy transfer through warm initialization, imitation, or interacting over a large set of agents with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-12 Girish Joshi , Girish Chowdhary

Behavioral skills or policies for autonomous agents are conventionally learned from reward functions, via reinforcement learning, or from demonstrations, via imitation learning. However, both modes of task specification have their…

Exploration remains a fundamental challenge in reinforcement learning (RL), particularly in environments with sparse or adversarial reward structures. In this work, we study how the architecture of deep neural policies implicitly shapes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-28 Jacob Adamczyk

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

We propose an approach to learning agents for active robotic mapping, where the goal is to map the environment as quickly as possible. The agent learns to map efficiently in simulated environments by receiving rewards corresponding to how…

Robotics · Computer Science 2018-01-01 Shane Barratt