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Unsupervised reinforcement learning (URL) aims to pre-train agents by exploring diverse states or skills in reward-free environments, facilitating efficient adaptation to downstream tasks. As the agent cannot access extrinsic rewards during…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-19 Chengyang Ying , Huayu Chen , Xinning Zhou , Zhongkai Hao , Hang Su , Jun Zhu

Reinforcement learning algorithms typically necessitate extensive exploration of the state space to find optimal policies. However, in safety-critical applications, the risks associated with such exploration can lead to catastrophic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-28 Kaustubh Mani , Vincent Mai , Charlie Gauthier , Annie Chen , Samer Nashed , Liam Paull

Although parallelism has been extensively used in reinforcement learning (RL), the quantitative effects of parallel exploration are not well understood theoretically. We study the benefits of simple parallel exploration for reward-free RL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-03 Pedro Cisneros-Velarde , Boxiang Lyu , Sanmi Koyejo , Mladen Kolar

We study the Safe Reinforcement Learning (SRL) problem using the Constrained Markov Decision Process (CMDP) formulation in which an agent aims to maximize the expected total reward subject to a safety constraint on the expected total value…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-27 Dongsheng Ding , Xiaohan Wei , Zhuoran Yang , Zhaoran Wang , Mihailo R. Jovanović

We present a data-driven framework for reachability analysis of nonlinear dynamical systems that requires no explicit model. A denoising diffusion probabilistic model learns the time-evolving state distribution of a dynamical system from…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-04-02 Yanliang Huang , Peng Xie , Wenyuan Wu , Zhuoqi Zeng , Amr Alanwar

We propose a reinforcement learning agent to solve hard exploration games by learning a range of directed exploratory policies. We construct an episodic memory-based intrinsic reward using k-nearest neighbors over the agent's recent…

Proximal policy optimization (PPO) algorithm is a deep reinforcement learning algorithm with outstanding performance, especially in continuous control tasks. But the performance of this method is still affected by its exploration ability.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-12 Junwei Zhang , Zhenghao Zhang , Shuai Han , Shuai Lü

The ability to explore efficiently and effectively is a central challenge of reinforcement learning. In this work, we consider exploration through the lens of information theory. Specifically, we cast exploration as a problem of maximizing…

Identifying algorithms that flexibly and efficiently discover temporally-extended multi-phase plans is an essential step for the advancement of robotics and model-based reinforcement learning. The core problem of long-range planning is…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-07-09 Aidan Curtis , Minjian Xin , Dilip Arumugam , Kevin Feigelis , Daniel Yamins

Ensuring sufficient exploration is a central challenge when training meta-reinforcement learning (meta-RL) agents to solve novel environments. Conventional solutions to the exploration-exploitation dilemma inject explicit incentives such as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-05 Micah Rentschler , Jesse Roberts

Curiosity has established itself as a powerful exploration strategy in deep reinforcement learning. Notably, leveraging expected future novelty as intrinsic motivation has been shown to efficiently generate exploratory trajectories, as well…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-29 Marco Bagatella , Georg Martius

Policy search reinforcement learning allows robots to acquire skills by themselves. However, the learning procedure is inherently unsafe as the robot has no a-priori way to predict the consequences of the exploratory actions it takes.…

Robotics · Computer Science 2018-10-09 Jens Lundell , Robert Krug , Erik Schaffernicht , Todor Stoyanov , Ville Kyrki

The promise of reinforcement learning is to solve complex sequential decision problems autonomously by specifying a high-level reward function only. However, reinforcement learning algorithms struggle when, as is often the case, simple and…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-09-17 Adrien Ecoffet , Joost Huizinga , Joel Lehman , Kenneth O. Stanley , Jeff Clune

Mastering deep reinforcement learning (DRL) proves challenging in tasks featuring scant rewards. These limited rewards merely signify whether the task is partially or entirely accomplished, necessitating various exploration actions before…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-11 Guojian Wang , Faguo Wu , Xiao Zhang

Although exploratory behaviors are ubiquitous in the animal kingdom, their computational underpinnings are still largely unknown. Behavioral Psychology has identified learning as a primary drive underlying many exploratory behaviors.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2011-12-14 Daniel Y. Little , Friedrich T. Sommer

Reinforcement learning with sparse rewards is challenging because an agent can rarely obtain non-zero rewards and hence, gradient-based optimization of parameterized policies can be incremental and slow. Recent work demonstrated that using…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-16 Yijie Guo , Jongwook Choi , Marcin Moczulski , Shengyu Feng , Samy Bengio , Mohammad Norouzi , Honglak Lee

Reinforcement Learning has drawn huge interest as a tool for solving optimal control problems. Solving a given problem (task or environment) involves converging towards an optimal policy. However, there might exist multiple optimal policies…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-16 Simo Alami. C , Fernando Llorente , Rim Kaddah , Luca Martino , Jesse Read

This paper is an initial endeavor to bridge the gap between powerful Deep Reinforcement Learning methodologies and the problem of exploration/coverage of unknown terrains. Within this scope, MarsExplorer, an openai-gym compatible…

Pure exploration in episodic Reinforcement Learning has primarily focused on Best Policy Identification (BPI), which seeks to identify a (near)-optimal policy with high confidence. Motivated by practical settings where a ``good enough''…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-25 Zitian Li , Wang Chi Cheung

Evaluating the performance of an ongoing policy plays a vital role in many areas such as medicine and economics, to provide crucial instructions on the early-stop of the online experiment and timely feedback from the environment. Policy…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-08-05 Ye Shen , Hengrui Cai , Rui Song