Related papers: Exploration and Incentives in Reinforcement Learni…
What drives exploration? Understanding intrinsic motivation is a long-standing challenge in both cognitive science and artificial intelligence; numerous objectives have been proposed and used to train agents, yet there remains a gap between…
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…
Exploration in reinforcement learning (RL) remains an open challenge. RL algorithms rely on observing rewards to train the agent, and if informative rewards are sparse the agent learns slowly or may not learn at all. To improve exploration…
Suppose an agent is in a (possibly unknown) Markov Decision Process in the absence of a reward signal, what might we hope that an agent can efficiently learn to do? This work studies a broad class of objectives that are defined solely as…
The study of exploration in the domain of decision making has a long history but remains actively debated. From the vast literature that addressed this topic for decades under various points of view (e.g., developmental psychology,…
Reinforcement learning algorithms typically struggle in the absence of a dense, well-shaped reward function. Intrinsically motivated exploration methods address this limitation by rewarding agents for visiting novel states or transitions,…
Reinforcement learning algorithms describe how an agent can learn an optimal action policy in a sequential decision process, through repeated experience. In a given environment, the agent policy provides him some running and terminal…
In the last few years, the research activity around reinforcement learning tasks formulated over environments with sparse rewards has been especially notable. Among the numerous approaches proposed to deal with these hard exploration…
In typical reinforcement learning (RL), the environment is assumed given and the goal of the learning is to identify an optimal policy for the agent taking actions through its interactions with the environment. In this paper, we extend this…
One of the remaining challenges in reinforcement learning is to develop agents that can generalise to novel scenarios they might encounter once deployed. This challenge is often framed in a multi-task setting where agents train on a fixed…
Understanding emerging behaviors of reinforcement learning (RL) agents may be difficult since such agents are often trained in complex environments using highly complex decision making procedures. This has given rise to a variety of…
One of the main challenges in reinforcement learning is solving tasks with sparse reward. We show that the difficulty of discovering a distant rewarding state in an MDP is bounded by the expected cover time of a random walk over the graph…
Reinforcement learning systems are often concerned with balancing exploration of untested actions against exploitation of actions that are known to be good. The benefit of exploration can be estimated using the classical notion of Value of…
How to best explore in domains with sparse, delayed, and deceptive rewards is an important open problem for reinforcement learning (RL). This paper considers one such domain, the recently-proposed multi-agent benchmark of Pommerman. This…
We propose and design recommendation systems that incentivize efficient exploration. Agents arrive sequentially, choose actions and receive rewards, drawn from fixed but unknown action-specific distributions. The recommendation system…
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…
Traditional reinforcement learning agents learn from experience, past or present, gained through interaction with their environment. Our approach synthesizes experience, without requiring an agent to interact with their environment, by…
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…
The explore{exploit dilemma is one of the central challenges in Reinforcement Learning (RL). Bayesian RL solves the dilemma by providing the agent with information in the form of a prior distribution over environments; however, full…
Recent rapid developments in reinforcement learning algorithms have been giving us novel possibilities in many fields. However, due to their exploring property, we have to take the risk into consideration when we apply those algorithms to…