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Goal-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning (GCRL) provides a versatile framework for developing unified controllers capable of handling wide ranges of tasks, exploring environments, and adapting behaviors. However, its reliance on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-20 Charly Pecqueux-Guézénec , Stéphane Doncieux , Nicolas Perrin-Gilbert

In the Bayesian approach to sequential decision making, exact calculation of the (subjective) utility is intractable. This extends to most special cases of interest, such as reinforcement learning problems. While utility bounds are known to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2011-11-14 Christos Dimitrakakis

The applicability of reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms in real-world domains often requires adherence to safety constraints, a need difficult to address given the asymptotic nature of the classic RL optimization objective. In contrast…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-15 Moritz A. Zanger , Karam Daaboul , J. Marius Zöllner

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has emerged as a scalable paradigm for improving the reasoning capabilities of large language models. However, its effectiveness is fundamentally limited by exploration: the policy can…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-18 Chanuk Lee , Sangwoo Park , Minki Kang , Sung Ju Hwang

In lifelong learning, an agent learns throughout its entire life without resets, in a constantly changing environment, as we humans do. Consequently, lifelong learning comes with a plethora of research problems such as continual domain…

We revisit the Reinforce policy gradient algorithm from the literature. Note that this algorithm typically works with cost returns obtained over random length episodes obtained from either termination upon reaching a goal state (as with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-10 Shalabh Bhatnagar

Exploration in reinforcement learning is a challenging problem: in the worst case, the agent must search for high-reward states that could be hidden anywhere in the state space. Can we define a more tractable class of RL problems, where the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-20 Kevin Li , Abhishek Gupta , Ashwin Reddy , Vitchyr Pong , Aurick Zhou , Justin Yu , Sergey Levine

We consider an active visual exploration scenario, where an agent must intelligently select its camera motions to efficiently reconstruct the full environment from only a limited set of narrow field-of-view glimpses. While the agent has…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2018-07-31 Santhosh K. Ramakrishnan , Kristen Grauman

Learning meaningful behaviors in the absence of reward is a difficult problem in reinforcement learning. A desirable and challenging unsupervised objective is to learn a set of diverse skills that provide a thorough coverage of the state…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-03 Pierre-Alexandre Kamienny , Jean Tarbouriech , Sylvain Lamprier , Alessandro Lazaric , Ludovic Denoyer

Achieving effective test-time scaling requires models to engage in In-Context Exploration -- the intrinsic ability to generate, verify, and refine multiple reasoning hypotheses within a single continuous context. Grounded in State Coverage…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-13 Futing Wang , Jianhao Yan , Yun Luo , Ganqu Cui , Zhi Wang , Xiaoye Qu , Yue Zhang , Yu Cheng , Tao Lin

In many predictive contexts (e.g., credit lending), true outcomes are only observed for samples that were positively classified in the past. These past observations, in turn, form training datasets for classifiers that make future…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-04 Vijay Keswani , Anay Mehrotra , L. Elisa Celis

Exploration is a fundamental aspect of reinforcement learning (RL), and its effectiveness is a deciding factor in the performance of RL algorithms, especially when facing sparse extrinsic rewards. Recent studies have shown the effectiveness…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-19 Shanchuan Wan , Yujin Tang , Yingtao Tian , Tomoyuki Kaneko

Recent works have studied *state entropy maximization* in reinforcement learning, in which the agent's objective is to learn a policy inducing high entropy over states visitation (Hazan et al., 2019). They typically assume full…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-05 Riccardo Zamboni , Duilio Cirino , Marcello Restelli , Mirco Mutti

With reinforcement learning, an agent could learn complex behaviors from high-level abstractions of the task. However, exploration and reward shaping remained challenging for existing methods, especially in scenarios where the extrinsic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-11 Jie Chen , Wenjun Xu

Uncertainty quantification has been extensively used as a means to achieve efficient directed exploration in Reinforcement Learning (RL). However, state-of-the-art methods for continuous actions still suffer from high sample complexity…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-07 Amarildo Likmeta , Matteo Sacco , Alberto Maria Metelli , Marcello Restelli

How to incentivize self-interested agents to explore when they prefer to exploit? Consider a population of self-interested agents that make decisions under uncertainty. They "explore" to acquire new information and "exploit" this…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-10-23 Aleksandrs Slivkins

Targeted and deliberate exploration of state--action pairs is essential in reward-free Markov Decision Problems (MDPs). More precisely, different state-action pairs exhibit different degree of importance or difficulty which must be actively…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-21 Xihe Gu , Urbashi Mitra , Tara Javidi

Reinforcement learning (RL) with sparse and deceptive rewards is challenging because non-zero rewards are rarely obtained. Hence, the gradient calculated by the agent can be stochastic and without valid information. Recent studies that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-08 Guojian Wang , Faguo Wu , Xiao Zhang , Jianxiang Liu

Autonomous exploration using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is essential for various tasks such as building inspections, rescue operations, deliveries, and warehousing. However, there are two main limitations to previous approaches: they…

Exploration is a crucial skill for in-context reinforcement learning in unknown environments. However, it remains unclear if large language models can effectively explore a partially hidden state space. This work isolates exploration as the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-26 Tim Grams , Patrick Betz , Sascha Marton , Stefan Lüdtke , Christian Bartelt