Related papers: Leveraging the Variance of Return Sequences for Ex…
Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards has significantly advanced the reasoning capabilities of large language models, yet how to explicitly steer training toward exploration or exploitation remains an open problem. We introduce…
Reinforcement learning with sparse rewards is still an open challenge. Classic methods rely on getting feedback via extrinsic rewards to train the agent, and in situations where this occurs very rarely the agent learns slowly or cannot…
Q-Learning is a fundamental off-policy reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm that has the objective of approximating action-value functions in order to learn optimal policies. Nonetheless, it has difficulties in reconciling bias with…
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…
Intrinsically motivated reinforcement learning aims to address the exploration challenge for sparse-reward tasks. However, the study of exploration methods in transition-dependent multi-agent settings is largely absent from the literature.…
Scaling issues are mundane yet irritating for practitioners of reinforcement learning. Error scales vary across domains, tasks, and stages of learning; sometimes by many orders of magnitude. This can be detrimental to learning speed and…
We study the convergence behavior of the celebrated temporal-difference (TD) learning algorithm. By looking at the algorithm through the lens of optimization, we first argue that TD can be viewed as an iterative optimization algorithm where…
Despite advancements in deep reinforcement learning algorithms, developing an effective exploration strategy is still an open problem. Most existing exploration strategies either are based on simple heuristics, or require the model of the…
Temporal difference learning (TD) is a simple iterative algorithm used to estimate the value function corresponding to a given policy in a Markov decision process. Although TD is one of the most widely used algorithms in reinforcement…
We study reinforcement learning (RL) in high dimensional episodic Markov decision processes (MDP). We consider value-based RL when the optimal Q-value is a linear function of d-dimensional state-action feature representation. For instance,…
In distributional reinforcement learning (RL), the estimated distribution of value function models both the parametric and intrinsic uncertainties. We propose a novel and efficient exploration method for deep RL that has two components. The…
Policy exploration is critical in reinforcement learning (RL), where existing approaches include greedy, Gaussian process, etc. However, these approaches utilize preset stochastic processes and are indiscriminately applied in all kinds of…
Thompson sampling is a well-known approach for balancing exploration and exploitation in reinforcement learning. It requires the posterior distribution of value-action functions to be maintained; this is generally intractable for tasks that…
This paper studies the potential of the return distribution for exploration in deterministic reinforcement learning (RL) environments. We study network losses and propagation mechanisms for Gaussian, Categorical and Gaussian mixture…
In this paper we consider the problem of obtaining sharp bounds for the performance of temporal difference (TD) methods with linear function approximation for policy evaluation in discounted Markov decision processes. We show that a simple…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) can model complex behavior policies for goal-directed sequential decision making tasks. A hallmark of RL algorithms is Temporal Difference (TD) learning: value function for the current state is moved towards a…
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…
Recent work has shown that reinforcement learning agents can develop policies that exploit spurious correlations between rewards and observations. This phenomenon, known as policy confounding, arises because the agent's policy influences…
Linear temporal logic (LTL) is a powerful language for task specification in reinforcement learning, as it allows describing objectives beyond the expressivity of conventional discounted return formulations. Nonetheless, recent works have…
Value function approximation is a crucial module for policy evaluation in reinforcement learning when the state space is large or continuous. The present paper takes a generative perspective on policy evaluation via temporal-difference (TD)…