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In actor-critic-based reinforcement learning algorithms such as Twin Delayed Deep Deterministic policy gradient (TD3), insufficient exploration of the spatial space can result in suboptimal policies when controlling 7-DOF robotic arms. To…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-08-27 Wen-Han Hsieh , Jen-Yuan Chang

Balancing exploration and exploitation is a fundamental part of reinforcement learning, yet most state-of-the-art algorithms use a naive exploration protocol like $\epsilon$-greedy. This contributes to the problem of high sample complexity,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-21 Tom Blau , Lionel Ott , Fabio Ramos

Entropy-based objectives are widely used to perform state space exploration in reinforcement learning (RL) and dataset generation for offline RL. Behavioral entropy (BE), a rigorous generalization of classical entropies that incorporates…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-07 Wesley A. Suttle , Aamodh Suresh , Carlos Nieto-Granda

We introduce Random Latent Exploration (RLE), a simple yet effective exploration strategy in reinforcement learning (RL). On average, RLE outperforms noise-based methods, which perturb the agent's actions, and bonus-based exploration, which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-28 Srinath Mahankali , Zhang-Wei Hong , Ayush Sekhari , Alexander Rakhlin , Pulkit Agrawal

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

Recently deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has achieved outstanding success on solving many difficult and large-scale RL problems. However the high sample cost required for effective learning often makes DRL unaffordable in resource-limited…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-09-06 Gang Chen , Yiming Peng , Mengjie Zhang

Recent advancements in deep reinforcement learning (RL) have demonstrated notable progress in sample efficiency, spanning both model-based and model-free paradigms. Despite the identification and mitigation of specific bottlenecks in prior…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-02 Yibo Wang , Jiang Zhao

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

We introduce Random Reward Perturbation (RRP), a novel exploration strategy for reinforcement learning (RL). Our theoretical analyses demonstrate that adding zero-mean noise to environmental rewards effectively enhances policy diversity…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-11 Haozhe Ma , Guoji Fu , Zhengding Luo , Jiele Wu , Tze-Yun Leong

Improving sample efficiency is central to Reinforcement Learning (RL), especially in environments where the rewards are sparse. Some recent approaches have proposed to specify reward functions as manually designed or learned reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-26 Shuai Han , Mehdi Dastani , Shihan Wang

Achieving effective test-time scaling requires models to engage in In-Context Exploration -- the intrinsic ability to generate, verify, and refine multiple reasoning hypotheses within a single continuous context. Grounded in State Coverage…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-13 Futing Wang , Jianhao Yan , Yun Luo , Ganqu Cui , Zhi Wang , Xiaoye Qu , Yue Zhang , Yu Cheng , Tao Lin

Entropy regularization is a standard technique in reinforcement learning (RL) to enhance exploration, yet it yields negligible effects or even degrades performance in Large Language Models (LLMs). We attribute this failure to the cumulative…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Chao Huang , Yujing Lu , Quangang Li , Shenghe Wang , Yan Wang , Yueyang Zhang , Long Xia , Jiashu Zhao , Zhiyuan Sun , Daiting Shi , Tingwen Liu

One of the challenges in online reinforcement learning (RL) is that the agent needs to trade off the exploration of the environment and the exploitation of the samples to optimize its behavior. Whether we optimize for regret, sample…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-19 Jean Tarbouriech , Matteo Pirotta , Michal Valko , Alessandro Lazaric

Exploration bonuses in reinforcement learning guide long-horizon exploration by defining custom intrinsic objectives. Several exploration objectives like count-based bonuses, pseudo-counts, and state-entropy maximization are non-stationary…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-24 Roger Creus Castanyer , Joshua Romoff , Glen Berseth

Reinforcement learning (RL) is one of the three basic paradigms of machine learning. It has demonstrated impressive performance in many complex tasks like Go and StarCraft, which is increasingly involved in smart manufacturing and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-03 Mingqi Yuan

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

Model-free deep-reinforcement-based learning algorithms have been applied to a range of COPs~\cite{bello2016neural}~\cite{kool2018attention}~\cite{nazari2018reinforcement}. However, these approaches suffer from two key challenges when…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-01 Nasrin Sultana , Jeffrey Chan , Tabinda Sarwar , A. K. Qin

Methods for reinforcement learning for recommendation (RL4Rec) are increasingly receiving attention as they can quickly adapt to user feedback. A typical RL4Rec framework consists of (1) a state encoder to encode the state that stores the…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2022-05-12 Jin Huang , Harrie Oosterhuis , Bunyamin Cetinkaya , Thijs Rood , Maarten de Rijke

Exploration of indoor environments has recently experienced a significant interest, also thanks to the introduction of deep neural agents built in a hierarchical fashion and trained with Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) on simulated…

State entropy regularization has empirically shown better exploration and sample complexity in reinforcement learning (RL). However, its theoretical guarantees have not been studied. In this paper, we show that state entropy regularization…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-02 Yonatan Ashlag , Uri Koren , Mirco Mutti , Esther Derman , Pierre-Luc Bacon , Shie Mannor