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Related papers: When should agents explore?

200 papers

An agent learning through interactions should balance its action selection process between probing the environment to discover new rewards and using the information acquired in the past to adopt useful behaviour. This trade-off is usually…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-07-02 Lucas Beyer , Damien Vincent , Olivier Teboul , Sylvain Gelly , Matthieu Geist , Olivier Pietquin

Scaling issues are mundane yet irritating for practitioners of reinforcement learning. Error scales vary across domains, tasks, and stages of learning; sometimes by many orders of magnitude. This can be detrimental to learning speed and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-13 Tom Schaul , Georg Ostrovski , Iurii Kemaev , Diana Borsa

Achieving efficient and scalable exploration in complex domains poses a major challenge in reinforcement learning. While Bayesian and PAC-MDP approaches to the exploration problem offer strong formal guarantees, they are often impractical…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2015-11-23 Bradly C. Stadie , Sergey Levine , Pieter Abbeel

Conveying complex objectives to reinforcement learning (RL) agents often requires meticulous reward engineering. Preference-based RL methods are able to learn a more flexible reward model based on human preferences by actively incorporating…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-26 Xinran Liang , Katherine Shu , Kimin Lee , Pieter Abbeel

We introduce Random Latent Exploration (RLE), a simple yet effective exploration strategy in reinforcement learning (RL). On average, RLE outperforms noise-based methods, which perturb the agent's actions, and bonus-based exploration, which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-28 Srinath Mahankali , Zhang-Wei Hong , Ayush Sekhari , Alexander Rakhlin , Pulkit Agrawal

Go-Explore achieved breakthrough performance on challenging reinforcement learning (RL) tasks with sparse rewards. The key insight of Go-Explore was that successful exploration requires an agent to first return to an interesting state…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-14 Zhao Yang , Thomas M. Moerland , Mike Preuss , Aske Plaat

Reinforcement learning (RL) agents improve through trial-and-error, but when reward is sparse and the agent cannot discover successful action sequences, learning stagnates. This has been a notable problem in training deep RL agents to…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-02-27 Evan Zheran Liu , Kelvin Guu , Panupong Pasupat , Tianlin Shi , Percy Liang

Artificial agents' adaptability to novelty and alignment with intended behavior is crucial for their effective deployment. Reinforcement learning (RL) leverages novelty as a means of exploration, yet agents often struggle to handle novel…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-06-07 Quentin Delfosse , Jannis Blüml , Bjarne Gregori , Kristian Kersting

Equipping artificial agents with useful exploration mechanisms remains a challenge to this day. Humans, on the other hand, seem to manage the trade-off between exploration and exploitation effortlessly. In the present article, we put…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-15 Marcel Binz , Eric Schulz

The use of mobile robots is being popular over the world mainly for autonomous explorations in hazardous/ toxic or unknown environments. This exploration will be more effective and efficient if the explorations in unknown environment can be…

Robotics · Computer Science 2011-10-11 Dip Narayan Ray , Somajyoti Majumder , Sumit Mukhopadhyay

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

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) is applied in safety-critical domains such as robotics and autonomous driving. It achieves superhuman abilities in many tasks, however whether DRL agents can be shown to act safely is an open problem. Atari…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-01-25 Mirco Giacobbe , Mohammadhosein Hasanbeig , Daniel Kroening , Hjalmar Wijk

Reinforcement learning (RL) is ubiquitous in the development of modern AI systems. However, state-of-the-art RL agents require extensive, and potentially unsafe, interactions with their environments to learn effectively. These limitations…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-01 Yarden As , Bhavya Sukhija , Lenart Treven , Carmelo Sferrazza , Stelian Coros , Andreas Krause

Exploration is widely regarded as one of the most challenging aspects of reinforcement learning (RL), with many naive approaches succumbing to exponential sample complexity. To isolate the challenges of exploration, we propose a new…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-10 Chi Jin , Akshay Krishnamurthy , Max Simchowitz , Tiancheng Yu

Autonomous artificial agents must be able to learn behaviors in complex environments without humans to design tasks and rewards. Designing these functions for each environment is not feasible, thus, motivating the development of intrinsic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-20 Alana Santana , Paula P. Costa , Esther L. Colombini

Atari games have been a long-standing benchmark in the reinforcement learning (RL) community for the past decade. This benchmark was proposed to test general competency of RL algorithms. Previous work has achieved good average performance…

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

We introduce exploration potential, a quantity that measures how much a reinforcement learning agent has explored its environment class. In contrast to information gain, exploration potential takes the problem's reward structure into…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-11-21 Jan Leike

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

How do you incentivize self-interested agents to $\textit{explore}$ when they prefer to $\textit{exploit}$? We consider complex exploration problems, where each agent faces the same (but unknown) MDP. In contrast with traditional…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-21 Max Simchowitz , Aleksandrs Slivkins