English
Related papers

Related papers: Improved Exploring Starts by Kernel Density Estima…

200 papers

We propose Deterministic Sequencing of Exploration and Exploitation (DSEE) algorithm with interleaving exploration and exploitation epochs for model-based RL problems that aim to simultaneously learn the system model, i.e., a Markov…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-21 Piyush Gupta , Vaibhav Srivastava

In dynamic spectrum access (DSA) networks, secondary users (SUs) need to opportunistically access primary users' (PUs) radio spectrum without causing significant interference. Since the interaction between the SU and the PU systems are…

Signal Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-05-22 Ramin Safavinejad , Hao-Hsuan Chang , Lingjia Liu

Reinforcement learning (RL) involves performing exploratory actions in an unknown system. This can place a learning agent in dangerous and potentially catastrophic system states. Current approaches for tackling safe learning in RL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-02 David Mguni , Usman Islam , Yaqi Sun , Xiuling Zhang , Joel Jennings , Aivar Sootla , Changmin Yu , Ziyan Wang , Jun Wang , Yaodong Yang

Reinforcement learning for control over continuous spaces typically uses high-entropy stochastic policies, such as Gaussian distributions, for local exploration and estimating policy gradient to optimize performance. Many robotic control…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-03 Ya-Chien Chang , Sicun Gao

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) offers a promising direction for learning policies from pre-collected datasets without requiring further interactions with the environment. However, existing methods struggle to handle out-of-distribution…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-12 Zhepeng Cen , Zuxin Liu , Zitong Wang , Yihang Yao , Henry Lam , Ding Zhao

The advent of promising quantum error correction (QEC) codes with efficient resource utilization and high-performance fault-tolerant quantum memories signifies a critical step towards realizing practical quantum computation. While surface…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2026-01-28 Yidong Zhou , Lingyi Kong , Yifeng Peng , Zhiding Liang

Exploration in environments with sparse rewards has been a persistent problem in reinforcement learning (RL). Many tasks are natural to specify with a sparse reward, and manually shaping a reward function can result in suboptimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-02-27 Ashvin Nair , Bob McGrew , Marcin Andrychowicz , Wojciech Zaremba , Pieter Abbeel

Controlled text generation tasks such as unsupervised text style transfer have increasingly adopted the use of Reinforcement Learning (RL). A major challenge in applying RL to such tasks is the sparse reward, which is available only after…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-04-19 Bhargav Upadhyay , Akhilesh Sudhakar , Arjun Maheswaran

Evolution strategy (ES) has been shown great promise in many challenging reinforcement learning (RL) tasks, rivaling other state-of-the-art deep RL methods. Yet, there are two limitations in the current ES practice that may hinder its…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-24 Jiaxing Zhang , Hoang Tran , Guannan Zhang

Reinforcement learning (RL) provides a theoretical framework for continuously improving an agent's behavior via trial and error. However, efficiently learning policies from scratch can be very difficult, particularly for tasks with…

Exploration is a fundamental challenge in reinforcement learning (RL). Many of the current exploration methods for deep RL use task-agnostic objectives, such as information gain or bonuses based on state visitation. However, many practical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-02-21 Abhishek Gupta , Russell Mendonca , YuXuan Liu , Pieter Abbeel , Sergey Levine

Acquiring abilities in the absence of a task-oriented reward function is at the frontier of reinforcement learning research. This problem has been studied through the lens of empowerment, which draws a connection between option discovery…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-04 Víctor Campos , Alexander Trott , Caiming Xiong , Richard Socher , Xavier Giro-i-Nieto , Jordi Torres

Evolution strategies (ES) are a family of black-box optimization algorithms able to train deep neural networks roughly as well as Q-learning and policy gradient methods on challenging deep reinforcement learning (RL) problems, but are much…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-10-31 Edoardo Conti , Vashisht Madhavan , Felipe Petroski Such , Joel Lehman , Kenneth O. Stanley , Jeff Clune

The goal of reinforcement learning (RL) is to let an agent learn an optimal control policy in an unknown environment so that future expected rewards are maximized. The model-free RL approach directly learns the policy based on data samples.…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2013-07-22 Syogo Mori , Voot Tangkaratt , Tingting Zhao , Jun Morimoto , Masashi Sugiyama

In this effort we consider a reinforcement learning (RL) technique for solving personalization tasks with complex reward signals. In particular, our approach is based on state space clustering with the use of a simplistic $k$-means…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-28 Anton Dereventsov , Ranga Raju Vatsavai , Clayton Webster

Balancing exploration and exploitation remains a key challenge in reinforcement learning (RL). State-of-the-art RL algorithms suffer from high sample complexity, particularly in the sparse reward case, where they can do no better than to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-22 Philippe Morere , Gilad Francis , Tom Blau , Fabio Ramos

Reinforcement learning (RL) is still rarely applied in industrial control, partly due to the difficulty of training reliable agents for real-world conditions. This work investigates how evolution strategies can support RL in such settings…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Tom Maus , Stephan Frank , Tobias Glasmachers

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has been used to learn effective heuristics for solving complex combinatorial optimisation problem via policy networks and have demonstrated promising performance. Existing works have focused on solving…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-25 Nasrin Sultana , Jeffrey Chan , A. K. Qin , Tabinda Sarwar

Although deep reinforcement learning (DRL) algorithms have made important achievements in many control tasks, they still suffer from the problems of sample inefficiency and unstable training process, which are usually caused by sparse…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-02-28 Ke Lin , Liang Gong , Xudong Li , Te Sun , Binhao Chen , Chengliang Liu , Zhengfeng Zhang , Jian Pu , Junping Zhang

Effective and intelligent exploration has been an unresolved problem for reinforcement learning. Most contemporary reinforcement learning relies on simple heuristic strategies such as $\epsilon$-greedy exploration or adding Gaussian noise…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-19 Muhammad Usama , Dong Eui Chang