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Related papers: Exploration and Incentives in Reinforcement Learni…

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Effective exploration in reinforcement learning requires not only tracking where an agent has been, but also understanding how the agent perceives and represents the world. To learn powerful representations, an agent should actively explore…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Faisal Mohamed , Catherine Ji , Benjamin Eysenbach , Glen Berseth

A sequential decision-making agent balances between exploring to gain new knowledge about an environment and exploiting current knowledge to maximize immediate reward. For environments studied in the traditional literature, optimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-23 Dilip Arumugam , Wanqiao Xu , Benjamin Van Roy

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has been proven its efficiency in capturing users' dynamic interests in recent literature. However, training a DRL agent is challenging, because of the sparse environment in recommender systems (RS), DRL…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2022-09-20 Xiaocong Chen , Siyu Wang , Lina Yao , Lianyong Qi , Yong Li

We study the problem of exploration in Reinforcement Learning and present a novel model-free solution. We adopt an information-theoretical viewpoint and start from the instance-specific lower bound of the number of samples that have to be…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-02 Alessio Russo , Alexandre Proutiere

The navigation problem is classically approached in two steps: an exploration step, where map-information about the environment is gathered; and an exploitation step, where this information is used to navigate efficiently. Deep…

Robotics · Computer Science 2019-01-08 Vikas Dhiman , Shurjo Banerjee , Brent Griffin , Jeffrey M Siskind , Jason J Corso

Exploration is a difficult challenge in reinforcement learning and is of prime importance in sparse reward environments. However, many of the state of the art deep reinforcement learning algorithms, that rely on epsilon-greedy, fail on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-10-15 Navneet Madhu Kumar

In Reinforcement Learning (RL), artificial agents are trained to maximize numerical rewards by performing tasks. Exploration is essential in RL because agents must discover information before exploiting it. Two rewards encouraging efficient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-14 Theodore Jerome Tinker , Kenji Doya , Jun Tani

The process of discovery requires active exploration -- the act of collecting new and informative data. However, efficient autonomous exploration remains a major unsolved problem. The dominant paradigm addresses this challenge by using…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Zakaria Mhammedi , James Cohan

Exploration is critical for good results in deep reinforcement learning and has attracted much attention. However, existing multi-agent deep reinforcement learning algorithms still use mostly noise-based techniques. Very recently,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-07-27 Iou-Jen Liu , Unnat Jain , Raymond A. Yeh , Alexander G. Schwing

Exploration is a major challenge in reinforcement learning, especially for high-dimensional domains that require function approximation. We propose exploration objectives -- policy optimization objectives that enable downstream maximization…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-06 Philip Amortila , Dylan J. Foster , Akshay Krishnamurthy

The use of mobile robots is being popular over the world mainly for autonomous explorations in hazardous/ toxic or unknown environments. This exploration will be more effective and efficient if the explorations in unknown environment can be…

Robotics · Computer Science 2011-10-11 Dip Narayan Ray , Somajyoti Majumder , Sumit Mukhopadhyay

Designing incentives for an adapting population is a ubiquitous problem in a wide array of economic applications and beyond. In this work, we study how to design additional rewards to steer multi-agent systems towards desired policies…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-11 Jiawei Huang , Vinzenz Thoma , Zebang Shen , Heinrich H. Nax , Niao He

We consider the generic approach of using an experience memory to help exploration by adapting a restart distribution. That is, given the capacity to reset the state with those corresponding to the agent's past observations, we help…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-19 Arash Tavakoli , Vitaly Levdik , Riashat Islam , Christopher M. Smith , Petar Kormushev

Reinforcement learning allows solving complex tasks, however, the learning tends to be task-specific and the sample efficiency remains a challenge. We present Plan2Explore, a self-supervised reinforcement learning agent that tackles both…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-02 Ramanan Sekar , Oleh Rybkin , Kostas Daniilidis , Pieter Abbeel , Danijar Hafner , Deepak Pathak

We study reward-free reinforcement learning (RL) with linear function approximation, where the agent works in two phases: (1) in the exploration phase, the agent interacts with the environment but cannot access the reward; and (2) in the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-15 Junkai Zhang , Weitong Zhang , Quanquan Gu

Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) and Deep Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) have achieved significant successes across a wide range of domains, including game AI, autonomous vehicles, robotics, and so on. However, DRL and deep MARL…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-02-03 Jianye Hao , Tianpei Yang , Hongyao Tang , Chenjia Bai , Jinyi Liu , Zhaopeng Meng , Peng Liu , Zhen Wang

Maximum entropy reinforcement learning motivates agents to explore states and actions to maximize the entropy of some distribution, typically by providing additional intrinsic rewards proportional to that entropy function. In this paper, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-20 Adrien Bolland , Gaspard Lambrechts , Damien Ernst

Efficient exploration is one of the main challenges in reinforcement learning (RL). Most existing sample-efficient algorithms assume the existence of a single reward function during exploration. In many practical scenarios, however, there…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-18 Xuezhou Zhang , Yuzhe ma , Adish Singla

Sequential decision tasks with incomplete information are characterized by the exploration problem; namely the trade-off between further exploration for learning more about the environment and immediate exploitation of the accrued…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2013-02-21 Grigoris I. Karakoulas

We address the challenge of exploration in reinforcement learning (RL) when the agent operates in an unknown environment with sparse or no rewards. In this work, we study the maximum entropy exploration problem of two different types. The…