Related papers: Exploration and Incentives in Reinforcement Learni…
Model free reinforcement learning suffers from the high sampling complexity inherent to robotic manipulation or locomotion tasks. Most successful approaches typically use random sampling strategies which leads to slow policy convergence. In…
Existing approaches for improving generalization in deep reinforcement learning (RL) have mostly focused on representation learning, neglecting RL-specific aspects such as exploration. We hypothesize that the agent's exploration strategy…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) is known to be often unsuccessful in environments with sparse extrinsic rewards. A possible countermeasure is to endow RL agents with an intrinsic reward function, or 'intrinsic motivation', which rewards the…
We study the problem of inverse reinforcement learning (IRL), where the learning agent recovers a reward function using expert demonstrations. Most of the existing IRL techniques make the often unrealistic assumption that the agent has…
What is a good exploration strategy for an agent that interacts with an environment in the absence of external rewards? Ideally, we would like to get a policy driving towards a uniform state-action visitation (highly exploring) in a minimum…
We propose a method to teach an automated agent to learn how to search for multi-hop paths of relations between entities in an open domain. The method learns a policy for directing existing information retrieval and machine reading…
Sparse reward environments are known to be challenging for reinforcement learning agents. In such environments, efficient and scalable exploration is crucial. Exploration is a means by which an agent gains information about the environment.…
We introduce the active exploration problem in Markov decision processes (MDPs). Each state of the MDP is characterized by a random value and the learner should gather samples to estimate the mean value of each state as accurately as…
Reinforcement learning (RL) agents improve through trial-and-error, but when reward is sparse and the agent cannot discover successful action sequences, learning stagnates. This has been a notable problem in training deep RL agents to…
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…
Incentivized exploration in multi-armed bandits (MAB) has witnessed increasing interests and many progresses in recent years, where a principal offers bonuses to agents to do explorations on her behalf. However, almost all existing studies…
The infamous exploration-exploitation dilemma is one of the oldest and most important problems in reinforcement learning (RL). Deliberate and effective exploration is necessary for RL agents to succeed in most environments. However, until…
In the incentivized exploration model, a principal aims to explore and learn over time by interacting with a sequence of self-interested agents. It has been recently understood that the main challenge in designing incentive-compatible…
In this paper we consider the problem of how a reinforcement learning agent tasked with solving a set of related Markov decision processes can use knowledge acquired early in its lifetime to improve its ability to more rapidly solve novel,…
We study reinforcement learning from human feedback in general Markov decision processes, where agents learn from trajectory-level preference comparisons. A central challenge in this setting is to design algorithms that select informative…
In practice, incentive providers (i.e., principals) often cannot observe the reward realizations of incentivized agents, which is in contrast to many principal-agent models that have been previously studied. This information asymmetry…
We consider a setting for Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) where the learner is extended with the ability to actively select multiple environments, observing an agent's behavior on each environment. We first demonstrate that if the…
Collaborative multi-agent exploration of unknown environments is crucial for search and rescue operations. Effective real-world deployment must address challenges such as limited inter-agent communication and static and dynamic obstacles.…
Reinforcement learning studies how an agent should interact with an environment to maximize its cumulative reward. A standard way to study this question abstractly is to ask how many samples an agent needs from the environment to learn an…
Learning a near optimal policy in a partially observable system remains an elusive challenge in contemporary reinforcement learning. In this work, we consider episodic reinforcement learning in a reward-mixing Markov decision process (MDP).…