Related papers: Principled Exploration via Optimistic Bootstrappin…
Efficient exploration remains a central challenge in reinforcement learning (RL), particularly in sparse-reward environments. We introduce Optimistic World Models (OWMs), a principled and scalable framework for optimistic exploration that…
Model-based reinforcement learning algorithms with probabilistic dynamical models are amongst the most data-efficient learning methods. This is often attributed to their ability to distinguish between epistemic and aleatoric uncertainty.…
The upper confidence reinforcement learning (UCRL2) algorithm introduced in (Jaksch et al., 2010) is a popular method to perform regret minimization in unknown discrete Markov Decision Processes under the average-reward criterion. Despite…
Optimistic initialisation is an effective strategy for efficient exploration in reinforcement learning (RL). In the tabular case, all provably efficient model-free algorithms rely on it. However, model-free deep RL algorithms do not use…
We propose a model-free reinforcement learning algorithm inspired by the popular randomized least squares value iteration (RLSVI) algorithm as well as the optimism principle. Unlike existing upper-confidence-bound (UCB) based approaches,…
In online reinforcement learning (RL), efficient exploration remains particularly challenging in high-dimensional environments with sparse rewards. In low-dimensional environments, where tabular parameterization is possible, count-based…
We study the problem of reinforcement learning in infinite-horizon discounted linear Markov decision processes (MDPs), and propose the first computationally efficient algorithm achieving rate-optimal regret guarantees in this setting. Our…
Offline Reinforcement Learning (RL) aims to learn policies from previously collected datasets without exploring the environment. Directly applying off-policy algorithms to offline RL usually fails due to the extrapolation error caused by…
In this work, we study the simple yet universally applicable case of reward shaping in value-based Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL). We show that reward shifting in the form of the linear transformation is equivalent to changing the…
Optimistic value estimates provide one mechanism for directed exploration in reinforcement learning (RL). The agent acts greedily with respect to an estimate of the value plus what can be seen as a value bonus. The value bonus can be…
Intrinsic rewards play a central role in handling the exploration-exploitation trade-off when designing sequential decision-making algorithms, in both foundational theory and state-of-the-art deep reinforcement learning. The LinUCB…
Achieving efficient and scalable exploration in complex domains poses a major challenge in reinforcement learning. While Bayesian and PAC-MDP approaches to the exploration problem offer strong formal guarantees, they are often impractical…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) has achieved tremendous success in recent years. However, the classical foundations of RL do not account for the risk sensitivity of the objective function, which is critical in various fields, including…
Efficient exploration remains a challenging problem in reinforcement learning, especially for those tasks where rewards from environments are sparse. A commonly used approach for exploring such environments is to introduce some "intrinsic"…
A key challenge to deploying reinforcement learning in practice is avoiding excessive (harmful) exploration in individual episodes. We propose a natural constraint on exploration -- \textit{uniformly} outperforming a conservative policy…
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…
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…
Efficient exploration is necessary to achieve good sample efficiency for reinforcement learning in general. From small, tabular settings such as gridworlds to large, continuous and sparse reward settings such as robotic object manipulation…
Conveying complex objectives to reinforcement learning (RL) agents often requires meticulous reward engineering. Preference-based RL methods are able to learn a more flexible reward model based on human preferences by actively incorporating…
Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a powerful method for improving the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs). Outcome-based RL, which rewards policies solely for the correctness of the final answer, yields substantial…