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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

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

In this paper, a unified framework for exploration in reinforcement learning (RL) is proposed based on an option-critic model. The proposed framework learns to integrate a set of diverse exploration strategies so that the agent can…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-10 Woojun Kim , Jeonghye Kim , Youngchul Sung

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

Designing a competent meta-reinforcement learning (meta-RL) algorithm in terms of data usage remains a central challenge to be tackled for its successful real-world applications. In this paper, we propose a sample-efficient meta-RL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-12 Jaeuk Shin , Giho Kim , Howon Lee , Joonho Han , Insoon Yang

Intelligent agents should have the ability to leverage knowledge from previously learned tasks in order to learn new ones quickly and efficiently. Meta-learning approaches have emerged as a popular solution to achieve this. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-17 Zhao Mandi , Pieter Abbeel , Stephen James

A major challenge of reinforcement learning (RL) in real-world applications is the variation between environments, tasks or clients. Meta-RL (MRL) addresses this issue by learning a meta-policy that adapts to new tasks. Standard MRL methods…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-03 Ido Greenberg , Shie Mannor , Gal Chechik , Eli Meirom

Meta-reinforcement learning (meta-RL) aims to learn from multiple training tasks the ability to adapt efficiently to unseen test tasks. Despite the success, existing meta-RL algorithms are known to be sensitive to the task distribution…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-02 Zichuan Lin , Garrett Thomas , Guangwen Yang , Tengyu Ma

The exploration-exploitation dilemma in reinforcement learning (RL) is a fundamental challenge to efficient RL algorithms. Existing algorithms for finite state and action discounted RL problems address this by assuming sufficient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-09 Caleb Ju , Guanghui Lan

Balancing exploration and exploitation remains a key challenge in reinforcement learning (RL). State-of-the-art RL algorithms suffer from high sample complexity, particularly in the sparse reward case, where they can do no better than to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-22 Philippe Morere , Gilad Francis , Tom Blau , Fabio Ramos

In recent years deep reinforcement learning (RL) systems have attained superhuman performance in a number of challenging task domains. However, a major limitation of such applications is their demand for massive amounts of training data. A…

Meta-learning algorithms use past experience to learn to quickly solve new tasks. In the context of reinforcement learning, meta-learning algorithms acquire reinforcement learning procedures to solve new problems more efficiently by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-05-01 Abhishek Gupta , Benjamin Eysenbach , Chelsea Finn , Sergey Levine

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

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

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

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:…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-02-21 Valentina Zangirolami , Matteo Borrotti

Although deep reinforcement learning has recently been very successful at learning complex behaviors, it requires a tremendous amount of data to learn a task. One of the fundamental reasons causing this limitation lies in the nature of the…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-09-19 Zhenshan Bing , Alexander Koch , Xiangtong Yao , Kai Huang , Alois Knoll

Exploration is widely regarded as one of the most challenging aspects of reinforcement learning (RL), with many naive approaches succumbing to exponential sample complexity. To isolate the challenges of exploration, we propose a new…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-10 Chi Jin , Akshay Krishnamurthy , Max Simchowitz , Tiancheng Yu

Ensuring sufficient exploration is a central challenge when training meta-reinforcement learning (meta-RL) agents to solve novel environments. Conventional solutions to the exploration-exploitation dilemma inject explicit incentives such as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-05 Micah Rentschler , Jesse Roberts

Deep reinforcement learning algorithms require large amounts of experience to learn an individual task. While in principle meta-reinforcement learning (meta-RL) algorithms enable agents to learn new skills from small amounts of experience,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-03-21 Kate Rakelly , Aurick Zhou , Deirdre Quillen , Chelsea Finn , Sergey Levine