Related papers: Long-Term Exploration in Persistent MDPs
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…
Reward-free reinforcement learning (RL) considers the setting where the agent does not have access to a reward function during exploration, but must propose a near-optimal policy for an arbitrary reward function revealed only after…
Exploration in sparse reward environments remains one of the key challenges of model-free reinforcement learning. Instead of solely relying on extrinsic rewards provided by the environment, many state-of-the-art methods use intrinsic…
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…
Exploration remains a fundamental challenge in reinforcement learning (RL), particularly in environments with sparse or adversarial reward structures. In this work, we study how the architecture of deep neural policies implicitly shapes…
We study reward-free and reward-agnostic exploration in episodic finite-horizon Markov decision processes (MDPs), where an agent explores an unknown environment without observing external rewards. Reward-free exploration aims to enable…
In typical reinforcement learning (RL), the environment is assumed given and the goal of the learning is to identify an optimal policy for the agent taking actions through its interactions with the environment. In this paper, we extend this…
Exploration has been a crucial part of reinforcement learning, yet several important questions concerning exploration efficiency are still not answered satisfactorily by existing analytical frameworks. These questions include exploration…
Exploration in reinforcement learning (RL) remains an open challenge. RL algorithms rely on observing rewards to train the agent, and if informative rewards are sparse the agent learns slowly or may not learn at all. To improve exploration…
The infamous exploration-exploitation dilemma is one of the oldest and most important problems in reinforcement learning (RL). Deliberate and effective exploration is necessary for RL agents to succeed in most environments. However, until…
Many potential applications of reinforcement learning (RL) are stymied by the large numbers of samples required to learn an effective policy. This is especially true when applying RL to real-world control tasks, e.g. in the sciences or…
Exploration is a prerequisite for learning useful behaviors in sparse-reward, long-horizon tasks, particularly within 3D environments. Curiosity-driven reinforcement learning addresses this via intrinsic rewards derived from the mismatch…
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…
Exploration is a key problem in reinforcement learning. Recently bonus-based methods have achieved considerable successes in environments where exploration is difficult such as Montezuma's Revenge, which assign additional bonuses (e.g.,…
Balancing exploration and exploitation remains a central challenge in reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) for large language models (LLMs). Current RLVR methods often overemphasize exploitation, leading to entropy…
Effective exploration in reinforcement learning requires not only tracking where an agent has been, but also understanding how the agent perceives and represents the world. To learn powerful representations, an agent should actively explore…
During initial iterations of training in most Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms, agents perform a significant number of random exploratory steps. In the real world, this can limit the practicality of these algorithms as it can lead to…
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…
We propose Deterministic Sequencing of Exploration and Exploitation (DSEE) algorithm with interleaving exploration and exploitation epochs for model-based RL problems that aim to simultaneously learn the system model, i.e., a Markov…
One of the main challenges in reinforcement learning is solving tasks with sparse reward. We show that the difficulty of discovering a distant rewarding state in an MDP is bounded by the expected cover time of a random walk over the graph…