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Related papers: When should agents explore?

200 papers

In continual RL we want agents capable of never-ending learning, and yet our evaluation methodologies do not reflect this. The standard practice in RL is to assume unfettered access to the deployment environment for the full lifetime of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-11 Golnaz Mesbahi , Parham Mohammad Panahi , Olya Mastikhina , Steven Tang , Martha White , Adam White

Reinforcement learning methods have recently been very successful at performing complex sequential tasks like playing Atari games, Go and Poker. These algorithms have outperformed humans in several tasks by learning from scratch, using only…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-28 Ajay Subramanian , Sharad Chitlangia , Veeky Baths

Determining what experience to generate to best facilitate learning (i.e. exploration) is one of the distinguishing features and open challenges in reinforcement learning. The advent of distributed agents that interact with parallel…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-17 Tom Schaul , Diana Borsa , David Ding , David Szepesvari , Georg Ostrovski , Will Dabney , Simon Osindero

Reproducibility in reinforcement learning is challenging: uncontrolled stochasticity from many sources, such as the learning algorithm, the learned policy, and the environment itself have led researchers to report the performance of learned…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-04-15 Kaleigh Clary , Emma Tosch , John Foley , David Jensen

Reinforcement learning (RL) studies how an agent comes to achieve reward in an environment through interactions over time. Recent advances in machine RL have surpassed human expertise at the world's oldest board games and many classic video…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-07-28 Pedro A. Tsividis , Joao Loula , Jake Burga , Nathan Foss , Andres Campero , Thomas Pouncy , Samuel J. Gershman , Joshua B. Tenenbaum

We introduce Random Reward Perturbation (RRP), a novel exploration strategy for reinforcement learning (RL). Our theoretical analyses demonstrate that adding zero-mean noise to environmental rewards effectively enhances policy diversity…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-11 Haozhe Ma , Guoji Fu , Zhengding Luo , Jiele Wu , Tze-Yun Leong

Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms have become indispensable tools in artificial intelligence, empowering agents to acquire optimal decision-making policies through interactions with their environment and feedback mechanisms. This study…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-28 Ergon Cugler de Moraes Silva

Boltzmann exploration is a classic strategy for sequential decision-making under uncertainty, and is one of the most standard tools in Reinforcement Learning (RL). Despite its widespread use, there is virtually no theoretical understanding…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-11-08 Nicolò Cesa-Bianchi , Claudio Gentile , Gábor Lugosi , Gergely Neu

Data efficiency is a key challenge for deep reinforcement learning. We address this problem by using unlabeled data to pretrain an encoder which is then finetuned on a small amount of task-specific data. To encourage learning…

Exploration is a difficult challenge in reinforcement learning and even recent state-of-the art curiosity-based methods rely on the simple epsilon-greedy strategy to generate novelty. We argue that pure random walks do not succeed to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-07-06 Fabio Pardo , Vitaly Levdik , Petar Kormushev

Cultures around the world show varying levels of conservatism. While maintaining traditional ideas prevents wrong ones from being embraced, it also slows or prevents adaptation to new times. Without exploration there can be no improvement,…

Populations and Evolution · Quantitative Biology 2023-04-17 Brian Mintz , Feng Fu

Exploration is one of the core challenges in reinforcement learning. A common formulation of curiosity-driven exploration uses the difference between the real future and the future predicted by a learned model. However, predicting the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-19 Victoria Dean , Shubham Tulsiani , Abhinav Gupta

This paper focuses on reinforcement learning (RL) with limited prior knowledge. In the domain of swarm robotics for instance, the expert can hardly design a reward function or demonstrate the target behavior, forbidding the use of both…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-08-07 Riad Akrour , Marc Schoenauer , Michèle Sebag

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to simulate or automate human behavior in complex sequential decision-making settings. A natural question is then whether LLMs exhibit similar decision-making behavior to humans, and can…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-04 Ziyuan Zhang , Darcy Wang , Ningyuan Chen , Rodrigo Mansur , Vahid Sarhangian

The inherent uncertainty in the environmental transition model of Reinforcement Learning (RL) necessitates a delicate balance between exploration and exploitation. This balance is crucial for optimizing computational resources to accurately…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-21 Yongxin Deng , Xihe Qiu , Jue Chen , Xiaoyu Tan

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

This paper proposes a paradigm shift for affective computing by viewing the affect modeling task as a reinforcement learning process. According to our proposed framework the context (environment) and the actions of an agent define the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-29 Matthew Barthet , Antonios Liapis , Georgios N. Yannakakis

We address the challenge of exploration in reinforcement learning (RL) when the agent operates in an unknown environment with sparse or no rewards. In this work, we study the maximum entropy exploration problem of two different types. The…

Reinforcement Learning enables to train an agent via interaction with the environment. However, in the majority of real-world scenarios, the extrinsic feedback is sparse or not sufficient, thus intrinsic reward formulations are needed to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-07 Patrik Reizinger , Márton Szemenyei

Reinforcement Learning (RL) enables an intelligent agent to optimise its performance in a task by continuously taking action from an observed state and receiving a feedback from the environment in form of rewards. RL typically uses tables…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-01-28 Alberto Castagna