Related papers: Principled Exploration via Optimistic Bootstrappin…
We address the challenge of efficient exploration in model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL), where the system dynamics are unknown and the RL agent must learn directly from online interactions. We propose Scalable and Optimistic MBRL…
We show how an ensemble of $Q^*$-functions can be leveraged for more effective exploration in deep reinforcement learning. We build on well established algorithms from the bandit setting, and adapt them to the $Q$-learning setting. We…
Efficient exploration in deep reinforcement learning remains a fundamental challenge, especially in environments characterized by high-dimensional states and sparse rewards. Traditional exploration strategies that rely on random local…
Optimistic exploration is central to improving sample efficiency in reinforcement learning with human feedback, yet existing exploratory bonus methods to incentivize exploration often fail to realize optimism. We provide a theoretical…
Deep neural networks (DNNs) demonstrate significant advantages in improving ranking performance in retrieval tasks. Driven by the recent technical developments in optimization and generalization of DNNs, learning a neural ranking model…
Learning complex robot behavior through interactions with the environment necessitates principled exploration. Effective strategies should prioritize exploring regions of the state-action space that maximize rewards, with optimistic…
Reinforcement Learning from Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) suffers from exploration inefficiency, where models struggle to generate successful rollouts, resulting in minimal learning signal. This challenge is particularly severe for tasks that…
Upper Confidence Bound (UCB) method is arguably the most celebrated one used in online decision making with partial information feedback. Existing techniques for constructing confidence bounds are typically built upon various concentration…
The general sequential decision-making problem, which includes Markov decision processes (MDPs) and partially observable MDPs (POMDPs) as special cases, aims at maximizing a cumulative reward by making a sequence of decisions based on a…
We consider un-discounted reinforcement learning (RL) in Markov decision processes (MDPs) under temporal drifts, ie, both the reward and state transition distributions are allowed to evolve over time, as long as their respective total…
Reinforcement learning algorithms are typically designed for discrete-time dynamics, even though the underlying real-world control systems are often continuous in time. In this paper, we study the problem of continuous-time reinforcement…
Deep latent variable models have achieved significant empirical successes in model-based reinforcement learning (RL) due to their expressiveness in modeling complex transition dynamics. On the other hand, it remains unclear theoretically…
Model-based Reinforcement Learning (MBRL) has been widely adapted due to its sample efficiency. However, existing worst-case regret analysis typically requires optimistic planning, which is not realistic in general. In contrast, motivated…
Despite the close connection between exploration and sample efficiency, most state of the art reinforcement learning algorithms include no considerations for exploration beyond maximizing the entropy of the policy. In this work we address…
The prevailing principle of "Optimism in the Face of Uncertainty" advocates for the incorporation of an exploration bonus, generally assumed to be proportional to the inverse square root of the visit count ($1/\sqrt{n}$), where $n$ is the…
We consider un-discounted reinforcement learning (RL) in Markov decision processes (MDPs) under drifting non-stationarity, i.e., both the reward and state transition distributions are allowed to evolve over time, as long as their respective…
Efficient selection among multiple generative models is increasingly important in modern generative AI, where sampling from suboptimal models is costly. This problem can be formulated as a multi-armed bandit task. Under diversity-aware…
Exploration is a crucial and distinctive aspect of reinforcement learning (RL) that remains a fundamental open problem. Several methods have been proposed to tackle this challenge. Commonly used methods inject random noise directly into the…
Reward-free exploration is a reinforcement learning setting studied by Jin et al. (2020), who address it by running several algorithms with regret guarantees in parallel. In our work, we instead give a more natural adaptive approach for…
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…