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The primary goal of reinforcement learning is to develop decision-making policies that prioritize optimal performance, frequently without considering safety. In contrast, safe reinforcement learning seeks to reduce or avoid unsafe behavior.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-17 Zahra Shahrooei , Ali Baheri

Exploration is a fundamental aspect of reinforcement learning (RL), and its effectiveness is a deciding factor in the performance of RL algorithms, especially when facing sparse extrinsic rewards. Recent studies have shown the effectiveness…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-19 Shanchuan Wan , Yujin Tang , Yingtao Tian , Tomoyuki Kaneko

A reinforcement learning agent tries to maximize its cumulative payoff by interacting in an unknown environment. It is important for the agent to explore suboptimal actions as well as to pick actions with highest known rewards. Yet, in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-01-23 Reazul Hasan Russel

Efficient exploration is a long-standing problem in sensorimotor learning. Major advances have been demonstrated in noise-free, non-stochastic domains such as video games and simulation. However, most of these formulations either get stuck…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-11 Deepak Pathak , Dhiraj Gandhi , Abhinav Gupta

Despite the considerable attention given to the questions of \textit{how much} and \textit{how to} explore in deep reinforcement learning, the investigation into \textit{when} to explore remains relatively less researched. While more…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-27 Marius Captari , Remo Sasso , Matthia Sabatelli

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

A major challenge in reinforcement learning is exploration, when local dithering methods such as epsilon-greedy sampling are insufficient to solve a given task. Many recent methods have proposed to intrinsically motivate an agent to seek…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-15 Riley Simmons-Edler , Ben Eisner , Daniel Yang , Anthony Bisulco , Eric Mitchell , Sebastian Seung , Daniel Lee

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

A promising technique for exploration is to maximize the entropy of visited state distribution, i.e., state entropy, by encouraging uniform coverage of visited state space. While it has been effective for an unsupervised setup, it tends to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-12 Dongyoung Kim , Jinwoo Shin , Pieter Abbeel , Younggyo Seo

Exploration is a significant challenge in practical reinforcement learning (RL), and uncertainty-aware exploration that incorporates the quantification of epistemic and aleatory uncertainty has been recognized as an effective exploration…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-08 Parvin Malekzadeh , Ming Hou , Konstantinos N. Plataniotis

This paper reviews exploration techniques in deep reinforcement learning. Exploration techniques are of primary importance when solving sparse reward problems. In sparse reward problems, the reward is rare, which means that the agent will…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-03 Pawel Ladosz , Lilian Weng , Minwoo Kim , Hyondong Oh

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

This work provides a rigorous framework for studying continuous time control problems in uncertain environments. The framework considered models uncertainty in state dynamics as a measure on the space of functions. This measure is…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2018-02-22 Ryan Murray , Michele Palladino

Identifying uncertainty and taking mitigating actions is crucial for safe and trustworthy reinforcement learning agents, especially when deployed in high-risk environments. In this paper, risk sensitivity is promoted in a model-based…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-10 Stefan Radic Webster , Peter Flach

In continuous control, exploration is often performed through undirected strategies in which parameters of the networks or selected actions are perturbed by random noise. Although the deep setting of undirected exploration has been shown to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-04 Baturay Saglam , Suleyman S. Kozat

We consider the problem of quantifying uncertainty over expected cumulative rewards in model-based reinforcement learning. In particular, we focus on characterizing the variance over values induced by a distribution over MDPs. Previous work…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-08 Carlos E. Luis , Alessandro G. Bottero , Julia Vinogradska , Felix Berkenkamp , Jan Peters

Solving tasks with sparse rewards is one of the most important challenges in reinforcement learning. In the single-agent setting, this challenge is addressed by introducing intrinsic rewards that motivate agents to explore unseen regions of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-25 Shariq Iqbal , Fei Sha

In order for reinforcement learning techniques to be useful in real-world decision making processes, they must be able to produce robust performance from limited data. Deep policy optimization methods have achieved impressive results on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-22 James Queeney , Ioannis Ch. Paschalidis , Christos G. Cassandras

Achieving efficient and scalable exploration in complex domains poses a major challenge in reinforcement learning. While Bayesian and PAC-MDP approaches to the exploration problem offer strong formal guarantees, they are often impractical…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2015-11-23 Bradly C. Stadie , Sergey Levine , Pieter Abbeel

Recent research on structured exploration placed emphasis on identifying novel states in the state space and incentivizing the agent to revisit them through intrinsic reward bonuses. In this study, we question whether the performance boost…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-12 Sneha Aenugu