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How to best explore in domains with sparse, delayed, and deceptive rewards is an important open problem for reinforcement learning (RL). This paper considers one such domain, the recently-proposed multi-agent benchmark of Pommerman. This…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-07-30 Chao Gao , Bilal Kartal , Pablo Hernandez-Leal , Matthew E. Taylor

A precondition for the deployment of a Reinforcement Learning agent to a real-world system is to provide guarantees on the learning process. While a learning algorithm will eventually converge to a good policy, there are no guarantees on…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-12-27 Paul Daoudi , Mathias Formoso , Othman Gaizi , Achraf Azize , Evrard Garcelon

Although parallelism has been extensively used in reinforcement learning (RL), the quantitative effects of parallel exploration are not well understood theoretically. We study the benefits of simple parallel exploration for reward-free RL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-03 Pedro Cisneros-Velarde , Boxiang Lyu , Sanmi Koyejo , Mladen Kolar

Exploration is a crucial skill for in-context reinforcement learning in unknown environments. However, it remains unclear if large language models can effectively explore a partially hidden state space. This work isolates exploration as the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-26 Tim Grams , Patrick Betz , Sascha Marton , Stefan Lüdtke , Christian Bartelt

The study of exploration in the domain of decision making has a long history but remains actively debated. From the vast literature that addressed this topic for decades under various points of view (e.g., developmental psychology,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-14 Léonard Hussenot , Robert Dadashi , Matthieu Geist , Olivier Pietquin

Reinforcement learning (RL) methods usually treat reward functions as black boxes. As such, these methods must extensively interact with the environment in order to discover rewards and optimal policies. In most RL applications, however,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-19 Rodrigo Toro Icarte , Toryn Q. Klassen , Richard Valenzano , Sheila A. McIlraith

Recent advancements have shown that reinforcement learning (RL) can substantially improve the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs). The effectiveness of such RL training, however, depends critically on the exploration space…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Haoyuan Wu , Hai Wang , Jiajia Wu , Jinxiang Ou , Keyao Wang , Weile Chen , Zihao Zheng , Bei Yu

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). Unlike traditional RL approaches, RLVR leverages rule-based feedback to guide…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-19 Jia Deng , Jie Chen , Zhipeng Chen , Daixuan Cheng , Fei Bai , Beichen Zhang , Yinqian Min , Yanzipeng Gao , Wayne Xin Zhao , Ji-Rong Wen

Despite the close connection between exploration and sample efficiency, most state of the art reinforcement learning algorithms include no considerations for exploration beyond maximizing the entropy of the policy. In this work we address…

Language model alignment (or, reinforcement learning) techniques that leverage active exploration -- deliberately encouraging the model to produce diverse, informative responses -- offer the promise of super-human capabilities. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-17 Dylan J. Foster , Zakaria Mhammedi , Dhruv Rohatgi

Unsupervised Reinforcement Learning (RL) provides a promising paradigm for learning useful behaviors via reward-free per-training. Existing methods for unsupervised RL mainly conduct empowerment-driven skill discovery or entropy-based…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-28 Chenjia Bai , Rushuai Yang , Qiaosheng Zhang , Kang Xu , Yi Chen , Ting Xiao , Xuelong Li

Reinforcement learning algorithms typically struggle in the absence of a dense, well-shaped reward function. Intrinsically motivated exploration methods address this limitation by rewarding agents for visiting novel states or transitions,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-18 Yuqing Du , Olivia Watkins , Zihan Wang , Cédric Colas , Trevor Darrell , Pieter Abbeel , Abhishek Gupta , Jacob Andreas

In reward-free reinforcement learning (RL), an agent explores the environment first without any reward information, in order to achieve certain learning goals afterwards for any given reward. In this paper we focus on reward-free RL under…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-21 Yuan Cheng , Ruiquan Huang , Jing Yang , Yingbin Liang

Efficient exploration remains a central challenge in reinforcement learning, serving as a useful pretraining objective for data collection, particularly when an external reward function is unavailable. A principled formulation of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-16 Jacob Adamczyk , Adam Kamoski , Rahul V. Kulkarni

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

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

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has been proven its efficiency in capturing users' dynamic interests in recent literature. However, training a DRL agent is challenging, because of the sparse environment in recommender systems (RS), DRL…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2022-09-20 Xiaocong Chen , Siyu Wang , Lina Yao , Lianyong Qi , Yong Li

We consider reinforcement learning (RL) in continuous time and study the problem of achieving the best trade-off between exploration of a black box environment and exploitation of current knowledge. We propose an entropy-regularized reward…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-02-14 Haoran Wang , Thaleia Zariphopoulou , Xunyu Zhou

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

Deep Research agents tackle knowledge-intensive tasks through multi-round retrieval and decision-oriented generation. While reinforcement learning (RL) has been shown to improve performance in this paradigm, its contributions remain…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-24 Yinuo Xu , Shuo Lu , Jianjie Cheng , Meng Wang , Qianlong Xie , Xingxing Wang , Ran He , Jian Liang
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