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Related papers: Long-Term Exploration in Persistent MDPs

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We consider scenarios from the real-time strategy game StarCraft as new benchmarks for reinforcement learning algorithms. We propose micromanagement tasks, which present the problem of the short-term, low-level control of army members…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2016-11-29 Nicolas Usunier , Gabriel Synnaeve , Zeming Lin , Soumith Chintala

Incomplete knowledge of the environment leads an agent to make decisions under uncertainty. One of the major dilemmas in Reinforcement Learning (RL) where an autonomous agent has to balance two contrasting needs in making its decisions is:…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-02-21 Valentina Zangirolami , Matteo Borrotti

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has catalyzed significant advances in the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, effectively managing the exploration and exploitation trade-off remains a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-16 Xiaofan Li , Ming Yang , Zhiyuan Ma , Shichao Ma , Jintao Du , Yu Cheng , Weiqiang Wang , Zhizhong Zhang , Xin Tan , Yanyun Qu , Lizhuang Ma , Yuan Xie

In high-stake scenarios like medical treatment and auto-piloting, it's risky or even infeasible to collect online experimental data to train the agent. Simulation-based training can alleviate this issue, but may suffer from its inherent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-16 Jialian Li , Tongzheng Ren , Dong Yan , Hang Su , Jun Zhu

This paper surveys the field of reinforcement learning from a computer-science perspective. It is written to be accessible to researchers familiar with machine learning. Both the historical basis of the field and a broad selection of…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2014-11-17 L. P. Kaelbling , M. L. Littman , A. W. Moore

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

Effective exploration is a key challenge in reinforcement learning for large language models: discovering high-quality trajectories within a limited sampling budget from the vast natural language sequence space. Existing methods face…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Yiran Guo , Zhongjian Qiao , Yingqi Xie , Jie Liu , Dan Ye , Ruiqing Zhang , Shuang Qiu , Lijie Xu

Classical game-theoretic approaches for multi-agent systems in both the forward policy design problem and the inverse reward learning problem often make strong rationality assumptions: agents perfectly maximize expected utilities under…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-23 Ran Tian , Liting Sun , Masayoshi Tomizuka

Efficient reinforcement learning (RL) involves a trade-off between "exploitative" actions that maximise expected reward and "explorative'" ones that sample unvisited states. To encourage exploration, recent approaches proposed adding…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-01 Changmin Yu , David Mguni , Dong Li , Aivar Sootla , Jun Wang , Neil Burgess

Bugs in popular distributed protocol implementations have been the source of many downtimes in popular internet services. We describe a randomized testing approach for distributed protocol implementations based on reinforcement learning.…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-09-05 Andrea Borgarelli , Constantin Enea , Rupak Majumdar , Srinidhi Nagendra

Recent advances in reinforcement learning have demonstrated its ability to solve hard agent-environment interaction tasks on a super-human level. However, the application of reinforcement learning methods to practical and real-world tasks…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-12-03 Oleg Svidchenko , Aleksei Shpilman

The exploration--exploitation trade-off in reinforcement learning (RL) is a well-known and much-studied problem that balances greedy action selection with novel experience, and the study of exploration methods is usually only considered in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-13 Jonathan C Balloch , Julia Kim , and Jessica L Inman , Mark O Riedl

Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents often struggle with inefficient exploration, particularly in environments with sparse rewards. Traditional exploration strategies can lead to slow learning and suboptimal performance because agents fail to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Gaurav Chaudhary , Laxmidhar Behera , Washim Uddin Mondal

We consider a class of reinforcement-learning systems in which the agent follows a behavior policy to explore a discrete state-action space to find an optimal policy while adhering to some restriction on its behavior. Such restriction may…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-07 Peter C. Y. Chen

Decision-making under distribution shift is a central challenge in reinforcement learning (RL), where training and deployment environments differ. We study this problem through the lens of robust Markov decision processes (RMDPs), which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-17 Jingwen Gu , Yiting He , Zhishuai Liu , Pan Xu

Penetration testing, the simulation of cyberattacks to identify security vulnerabilities, presents a sequential decision-making problem well-suited for reinforcement learning (RL) automation. Like many applications of RL to real-world…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-25 Raphael Simon , Pieter Libin , Wim Mees

Collaborative multi-agent exploration of unknown environments is crucial for search and rescue operations. Effective real-world deployment must address challenges such as limited inter-agent communication and static and dynamic obstacles.…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-12-31 Gabriele Calzolari , Vidya Sumathy , Christoforos Kanellakis , George Nikolakopoulos

An ideal embodied agent should possess lifelong learning capabilities to handle long-horizon and complex tasks, enabling continuous operation in general environments. This not only requires the agent to accurately accomplish given tasks but…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Sen Wang , Bangwei Liu , Zhenkun Gao , Lizhuang Ma , Xuhong Wang , Yuan Xie , Xin Tan

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

General purpose intelligent learning agents cycle through (complex,non-MDP) sequences of observations, actions, and rewards. On the other hand, reinforcement learning is well-developed for small finite state Markov Decision Processes…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2009-12-30 Marcus Hutter