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This paper presents a novel form of policy gradient for model-free reinforcement learning (RL) with improved exploration properties. Current policy-based methods use entropy regularization to encourage undirected exploration of the reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-03-17 Ofir Nachum , Mohammad Norouzi , Dale Schuurmans

Reward engineering and designing an incentive reward function are non-trivial tasks to train agents in complex environments. Furthermore, an inaccurate reward function may lead to a biased behaviour which is far from an efficient and…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-05-04 Saeed Tafazzol , Erfan Fathi , Mahdi Rezaei , Ehsan Asali

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-27 Wanqiao Xu , Jason Yecheng Ma , Kan Xu , Hamsa Bastani , Osbert Bastani

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-06 Sebastian Griesbach , Carlo D'Eramo

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-08 Emilie Kaufmann , Pierre Ménard , Omar Darwiche Domingues , Anders Jonsson , Edouard Leurent , Michal Valko

A default assumption in the design of reinforcement-learning algorithms is that a decision-making agent always explores to learn optimal behavior. In sufficiently complex environments that approach the vastness and scale of the real world,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-23 Dilip Arumugam , Saurabh Kumar , Ramki Gummadi , Benjamin Van Roy

Exploration algorithms for reinforcement learning typically replace or augment the reward function with an additional ``intrinsic'' reward that trains the agent to seek previously unseen states of the environment. Here, we consider an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Kevin McKee , Eric Alt , Andrew Grebenisan , Mick van Gelderen , Gary Miguel

The deep reinforcement learning (DRL) algorithm works brilliantly on solving various complex control tasks. This phenomenal success can be partly attributed to DRL encouraging intelligent agents to sufficiently explore the environment and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-09 Chao Li , Chen Gong , Qiang He , Xinwen Hou , Yu Liu

Exploration in environments with sparse rewards remains a fundamental challenge in reinforcement learning (RL). Existing approaches such as curriculum learning and Go-Explore often rely on hand-crafted heuristics, while curiosity-driven…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Georgios Sotirchos , Zlatan Ajanović , Jens Kober

Exploration is essential for reinforcement learning (RL). To face the challenges of exploration, we consider a reward-free RL framework that completely separates exploration from exploitation and brings new challenges for exploration…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-11 Chuheng Zhang , Yuanying Cai , Longbo Huang , Jian Li

In this paper, we discuss the deterministic policy gradient using the Actor-Critic methods based on the linear compatible advantage function approximator, where the input spaces are continuous. When the policy is restricted by hard…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2021-04-07 Arash Bahari Kordabad , Hossein Nejatbakhsh Esfahani , Sebastien Gros

We study the policy evaluation problem in an online multi-reward multi-policy discounted setting, where multiple reward functions must be evaluated simultaneously for different policies. We adopt an $(\epsilon,\delta)$-PAC perspective to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-19 Alessio Russo , Aldo Pacchiano

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-12 Yiding Jiang , J. Zico Kolter , Roberta Raileanu

Reinforcement learning has empowered large language models to act as intelligent agents, yet training them for long-horizon tasks remains challenging due to the scarcity of high-quality trajectories, especially under limited resources.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-29 Jinyang Wu , Shuo Yang , Changpeng Yang , Yuhao Shen , Shuai Zhang , Zhengqi Wen , Jianhua Tao

Safe exploration aims at addressing the limitations of Reinforcement Learning (RL) in safety-critical scenarios, where failures during trial-and-error learning may incur high costs. Several methods exist to incorporate external knowledge or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-13 Xiaotong Ji , Antonio Filieri

Animals have a developed ability to explore that aids them in important tasks such as locating food, exploring for shelter, and finding misplaced items. These exploration skills necessarily track where they have been so that they can plan…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-27 Arnav Kumar Jain , Lucas Lehnert , Irina Rish , Glen Berseth

In a reward-free environment, what is a suitable intrinsic objective for an agent to pursue so that it can learn an optimal task-agnostic exploration policy? In this paper, we argue that the entropy of the state distribution induced by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-02 Mirco Mutti , Lorenzo Pratissoli , Marcello Restelli

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…

Reinforcement Learning is a powerful tool to model decision-making processes. However, it relies on an exploration-exploitation trade-off that remains an open challenge for many tasks. In this work, we study neighboring state-based,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-04 Yu-Teng Li , Justin Lin , Jeffery Cheng , Pedro Pachuca

A promising technique for exploration is to maximize the entropy of visited state distribution, i.e., state entropy, by encouraging uniform coverage of visited state space. While it has been effective for an unsupervised setup, it tends to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-12 Dongyoung Kim , Jinwoo Shin , Pieter Abbeel , Younggyo Seo