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Efficient reinforcement learning (RL) involves a trade-off between "exploitative" actions that maximise expected reward and "explorative'" ones that sample unvisited states. To encourage exploration, recent approaches proposed adding…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-01 Changmin Yu , David Mguni , Dong Li , Aivar Sootla , Jun Wang , Neil Burgess

Directed exploration strategies for reinforcement learning are critical for learning an optimal policy in a minimal number of interactions with the environment. Many algorithms use optimism to direct exploration, either through visitation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-07 Raksha Kumaraswamy , Matthew Schlegel , Adam White , Martha White

The temporal difference (TD) error was first formalized in Sutton (1988), where it was first characterized as the difference between temporally successive predictions, and later, in that same work, formulated as the difference between a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Juan Sebastian Rojas , Chi-Guhn Lee

Temporal difference learning and Residual Gradient methods are the most widely used temporal difference based learning algorithms; however, it has been shown that none of their objective functions is optimal w.r.t approximating the true…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-04-21 Bo Liu , Daoming Lyu , Wen Dong , Saad Biaz

This paper gives specific divergence examples of value-iteration for several major Reinforcement Learning and Adaptive Dynamic Programming algorithms, when using a function approximator for the value function. These divergence examples…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-07-31 Michael Fairbank , Eduardo Alonso

Deep reinforcement learning has been shown to be a powerful framework for learning policies from complex high-dimensional sensory inputs to actions in complex tasks, such as the Atari domain. In this paper, we explore output representation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-06-16 Ishan P. Durugkar , Clemens Rosenbaum , Stefan Dernbach , Sridhar Mahadevan

Exploration remains a key challenge in deep reinforcement learning (RL). Optimism in the face of uncertainty is a well-known heuristic with theoretical guarantees in the tabular setting, but how best to translate the principle to deep…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-06 Brendan O'Donoghue

A widely-studied deep reinforcement learning (RL) technique known as Prioritized Experience Replay (PER) allows agents to learn from transitions sampled with non-uniform probability proportional to their temporal-difference (TD) error.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-02 Baturay Saglam , Furkan B. Mutlu , Dogan C. Cicek , Suleyman S. Kozat

In this work, we consider policy-based methods for solving the reinforcement learning problem, and establish the sample complexity guarantees. A policy-based algorithm typically consists of an actor and a critic. We consider using various…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-16 Zaiwei Chen , Siva Theja Maguluri

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has recently demonstrated remarkable potential in enhancing the reasoning capability of Large Reasoning Models (LRMs). However, RLVR often drives the policy toward over-determinism,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-23 Shimin Zhang , Xianwei Chen , Yufan Shen , Ziyuan Ye , Jibin Wu

The ability to effectively reuse prior knowledge is a key requirement when building general and flexible Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents. Skill reuse is one of the most common approaches, but current methods have considerable…

We introduce an exploration bonus for deep reinforcement learning methods that is easy to implement and adds minimal overhead to the computation performed. The bonus is the error of a neural network predicting features of the observations…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-10-31 Yuri Burda , Harrison Edwards , Amos Storkey , Oleg Klimov

Exploration remains a central challenge for reinforcement learning (RL). Virtually all existing methods share the feature of a monolithic behaviour policy that changes only gradually (at best). In contrast, the exploratory behaviours of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-07 Miruna Pîslar , David Szepesvari , Georg Ostrovski , Diana Borsa , Tom Schaul

There are two distinct approaches to solving reinforcement learning problems, namely, searching in value function space and searching in policy space. Temporal difference methods and evolutionary algorithms are well-known examples of these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2011-06-02 J. J. Grefenstette , D. E. Moriarty , A. C. Schultz

Temporal-difference (TD) methods learn state and action values efficiently by bootstrapping from their own future value predictions, but such a self-bootstrapping mechanism is prone to bootstrapping bias, where the errors in the value…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-15 Qiyang Li , Seohong Park , Sergey Levine

When to solve math problems, most language models take a sampling strategy to predict next word according conditional probabilities. In the math reasoning step, it may generate wrong answer. Considering math problems are deterministic, we…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-07-19 Gang Chen

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) agents excel in solving complex decision-making tasks across various domains. However, they often require a substantial number of training steps and a vast experience replay buffer, leading to significant…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-20 Tal Fiskus , Uri Shaham

In this work we present a novel approach for transfer-guided exploration in reinforcement learning that is inspired by the human tendency to leverage experiences from similar encounters in the past while navigating a new task. Given an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-05-28 Anirban Santara , Rishabh Madan , Balaraman Ravindran , Pabitra Mitra

Offline Reinforcement learning is commonly used for sequential decision-making in domains such as healthcare and education, where the rewards are known and the transition dynamics $T$ must be estimated on the basis of batch data. A key…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-10 Leo Benac , Sonali Parbhoo , Finale Doshi-Velez

Value approximation using deep neural networks is at the heart of off-policy deep reinforcement learning, and is often the primary module that provides learning signals to the rest of the algorithm. While multi-layer perceptron networks are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-10 Ge Yang , Anurag Ajay , Pulkit Agrawal