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The performance of off-policy learning, including deep Q-learning and deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG), critically depends on the choice of the exploration policy. Existing exploration methods are mostly based on adding noise to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-03-28 Tianbing Xu , Qiang Liu , Liang Zhao , Jian Peng

In reinforcement learning (RL), an agent must explore an initially unknown environment in order to learn a desired behaviour. When RL agents are deployed in real world environments, safety is of primary concern. Constrained Markov decision…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-24 David M. Bossens , Nicholas Bishop

Exploration is a prerequisite for learning useful behaviors in sparse-reward, long-horizon tasks, particularly within 3D environments. Curiosity-driven reinforcement learning addresses this via intrinsic rewards derived from the mismatch…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Lily Goli , Justin Kerr , Daniele Reda , Alec Jacobson , Andrea Tagliasacchi , Angjoo Kanazawa

Optimism about the poorly understood states and actions is the main driving force of exploration for many provably-efficient reinforcement learning algorithms. We propose optimism in the face of sensible value functions (OFVF)- a novel…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-04-19 Reazul H. Russel , Tianyi Gu , Marek Petrik

Designing protocols enhancing cooperation for multi-agent systems remains a grand challenge. Cheap talk, defined as costless, non-binding communication before formal action, serves as a pivotal solution. However, existing theoretical…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Zhao Song , Chen Shen , Zhen Wang , The Anh Han

Recent years have witnessed a tremendous improvement of deep reinforcement learning. However, a challenging problem is that an agent may suffer from inefficient exploration, particularly for on-policy methods. Previous exploration methods…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-17 Ling Pan , Qingpeng Cai , Longbo Huang

Language model alignment (or, reinforcement learning) techniques that leverage active exploration -- deliberately encouraging the model to produce diverse, informative responses -- offer the promise of super-human capabilities. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-17 Dylan J. Foster , Zakaria Mhammedi , Dhruv Rohatgi

A fundamental issue in reinforcement learning algorithms is the balance between exploration of the environment and exploitation of information already obtained by the agent. Especially, exploration has played a critical role for both…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-29 Ruihan Yang , Qiwei Ye , Tie-Yan Liu

There has been growing progress on theoretical analyses for provably efficient learning in MDPs with linear function approximation, but much of the existing work has made strong assumptions to enable exploration by conventional exploration…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-23 Andrea Zanette , Alessandro Lazaric , Mykel J. Kochenderfer , Emma Brunskill

Sparse reward environments are known to be challenging for reinforcement learning agents. In such environments, efficient and scalable exploration is crucial. Exploration is a means by which an agent gains information about the environment.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-11 Jacob Chmura , Hasham Burhani , Xiao Qi Shi

Within the framework of probably approximately correct Markov decision processes (PAC-MDP), much theoretical work has focused on methods to attain near optimality after a relatively long period of learning and exploration. However,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2016-04-06 Kenji Kawaguchi

In tabular Markov decision processes (MDPs) with perfect state observability, each trajectory provides active samples from the transition distributions conditioned on state-action pairs. Consequently, accurate model estimation depends on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-25 Xihe Gu , Urbashi Mitra , Tara Javidi

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

Balancing exploration and exploitation is a fundamental part of reinforcement learning, yet most state-of-the-art algorithms use a naive exploration protocol like $\epsilon$-greedy. This contributes to the problem of high sample complexity,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-21 Tom Blau , Lionel Ott , Fabio Ramos

Scaling reinforcement learning to tens of thousands of parallel environments requires overcoming the limited exploration capacity of a single policy. Ensemble-based policy gradient methods, which employ multiple policies to collect diverse…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-04 Naoki Shitanda , Motoki Omura , Tatsuya Harada , Takayuki Osa

On-policy reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms have demonstrated great potential in robotic control, where effective exploration is crucial for efficient and high-quality policy learning. However, how to encourage the agent to explore the…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-04-02 Leixin Chang , Xinchen Yao , Ben Liu , Liangjing Yang , Hua Chen

We consider a class of reinforcement-learning systems in which the agent follows a behavior policy to explore a discrete state-action space to find an optimal policy while adhering to some restriction on its behavior. Such restriction may…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-07 Peter C. Y. Chen

We present a new method for estimating the expected return of a POMDP from experience. The method does not assume any knowledge of the POMDP and allows the experience to be gathered from an arbitrary sequence of policies. The return is…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2013-01-14 Christian R. Shelton

We are often interested in identifying the feasible subset of a decision space under multiple constraints to permit effective design exploration. If determining feasibility required computationally expensive simulations, the cost of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-25 Alma Rahat , Michael Wood

Efficient exploration remains a challenging research problem in reinforcement learning, especially when an environment contains large state spaces, deceptive local optima, or sparse rewards. To tackle this problem, we present a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-10-30 Zhang-Wei Hong , Tzu-Yun Shann , Shih-Yang Su , Yi-Hsiang Chang , Chun-Yi Lee