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Related papers: A Survey of Exploration Methods in Reinforcement L…

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We consider a team of reinforcement learning agents that concurrently learn to operate in a common environment. We identify three properties - adaptivity, commitment, and diversity - which are necessary for efficient coordinated exploration…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-12-18 Maria Dimakopoulou , Benjamin Van Roy

Reinforcement learning with sparse rewards is still an open challenge. Classic methods rely on getting feedback via extrinsic rewards to train the agent, and in situations where this occurs very rarely the agent learns slowly or cannot…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-04 Simone Parisi , Davide Tateo , Maximilian Hensel , Carlo D'Eramo , Jan Peters , Joni Pajarinen

Reinforcement learning (RL) is one of the three basic paradigms of machine learning. It has demonstrated impressive performance in many complex tasks like Go and StarCraft, which is increasingly involved in smart manufacturing and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-03 Mingqi Yuan

The exploration-exploitation dilemma in reinforcement learning (RL) is a fundamental challenge to efficient RL algorithms. Existing algorithms for finite state and action discounted RL problems address this by assuming sufficient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-09 Caleb Ju , Guanghui Lan

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

Many reinforcement learning exploration techniques are overly optimistic and try to explore every state. Such exploration is impossible in environments with the unlimited number of states. I propose to use simulated exploration with an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2009-05-20 Ivo Danihelka

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

Reinforcement learning is a powerful technique for learning from trial and error, but it often requires a large number of interactions to achieve good performance. In some domains, such as sparse-reward tasks, an oracle that can provide…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-09-22 Zhourui Guo , Meng Yao , Yang Yu , Qiyue Yin

Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents often struggle in sparse-reward environments where traditional exploration strategies fail to discover effective action sequences. Large Language Models (LLMs) possess procedural knowledge and reasoning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-13 Vaibhav Jain , Gerrit Grossmann

There are two distinct approaches to solving reinforcement learning problems, namely, searching in value function space and searching in policy space. Temporal difference methods and evolutionary algorithms are well-known examples of these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2011-06-02 J. J. Grefenstette , D. E. Moriarty , A. C. Schultz

We present a representation-driven framework for reinforcement learning. By representing policies as estimates of their expected values, we leverage techniques from contextual bandits to guide exploration and exploitation. Particularly,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-23 Ofir Nabati , Guy Tennenholtz , Shie Mannor

Reinforcement learning algorithms typically struggle in the absence of a dense, well-shaped reward function. Intrinsically motivated exploration methods address this limitation by rewarding agents for visiting novel states or transitions,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-18 Yuqing Du , Olivia Watkins , Zihan Wang , Cédric Colas , Trevor Darrell , Pieter Abbeel , Abhishek Gupta , Jacob Andreas

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a branch of machine learning which is employed to solve various sequential decision making problems without proper supervision. Due to the recent advancement of deep learning, the newly proposed Deep-RL…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2019-04-17 Dhruv Ramani

We study the use of randomized value functions to guide deep exploration in reinforcement learning. This offers an elegant means for synthesizing statistically and computationally efficient exploration with common practical approaches to…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-09-25 Ian Osband , Benjamin Van Roy , Daniel Russo , Zheng Wen

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

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become essential to the post-training of large language models (LLMs) for reasoning, agentic capabilities and alignment. Successful RL relies on sufficient exploration of diverse actions by the model during…

Reinforcement Learning has emerged as a strong alternative to solve optimization tasks efficiently. The use of these algorithms highly depends on the feedback signals provided by the environment in charge of informing about how good (or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-01 Alain Andres , Esther Villar-Rodriguez , Javier Del Ser

Sequential decision making under uncertainty is central to many Process Systems Engineering (PSE) challenges, where traditional methods often face limitations related to controlling and optimizing complex and stochastic systems.…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-10-29 Maximilian Bloor , Max Mowbray , Ehecatl Antonio Del Rio Chanona , Calvin Tsay

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

We study the problem of learning exploration-exploitation strategies that effectively adapt to dynamic environments, where the task may change over time. While RNN-based policies could in principle represent such strategies, in practice…