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We study the problem of exploration in Reinforcement Learning and present a novel model-free solution. We adopt an information-theoretical viewpoint and start from the instance-specific lower bound of the number of samples that have to be…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-02 Alessio Russo , Alexandre Proutiere

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-12 Simone Parisi , Alireza Kazemipour , Michael Bowling

In constrained reinforcement learning (RL), a learning agent seeks to not only optimize the overall reward but also satisfy the additional safety, diversity, or budget constraints. Consequently, existing constrained RL solutions require…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-13 Sobhan Miryoosefi , Chi Jin

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) aims at learning an optimal strategy using a pre-collected dataset without further interactions with the environment. While various algorithms have been proposed for offline RL in the previous literature,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-02 Wei Xiong , Han Zhong , Chengshuai Shi , Cong Shen , Liwei Wang , Tong Zhang

Although model-based reinforcement learning (RL) approaches are considered more sample efficient, existing algorithms are usually relying on sophisticated planning algorithm to couple tightly with the model-learning procedure. Hence the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-15 Xiaoyu Chen , Jiachen Hu , Lin F. Yang , Liwei Wang

Finding optimal policies which maximize long term rewards of Markov Decision Processes requires the use of dynamic programming and backward induction to solve the Bellman optimality equation. However, many real-world problems require…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-10 Mridul Agarwal , Vaneet Aggarwal

Mastering deep reinforcement learning (DRL) proves challenging in tasks featuring scant rewards. These limited rewards merely signify whether the task is partially or entirely accomplished, necessitating various exploration actions before…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-11 Guojian Wang , Faguo Wu , Xiao Zhang

The explore{exploit dilemma is one of the central challenges in Reinforcement Learning (RL). Bayesian RL solves the dilemma by providing the agent with information in the form of a prior distribution over environments; however, full…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-03-19 Jonathan Sorg , Satinder Singh , Richard L. Lewis

Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) lies at the heart of a plethora of applications involving the interaction of a group of agents in a shared unknown environment. A prominent framework for studying MARL is Markov games, with the goal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-17 Tong Yang , Bo Dai , Lin Xiao , Yuejie Chi

High sample complexity remains a barrier to the application of reinforcement learning (RL), particularly in multi-agent systems. A large body of work has demonstrated that exploration mechanisms based on the principle of optimism under…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-08-02 Robert Loftin , Aadirupa Saha , Sam Devlin , Katja Hofmann

We study reward-free reinforcement learning (RL) under general non-linear function approximation, and establish sample efficiency and hardness results under various standard structural assumptions. On the positive side, we propose the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-25 Jinglin Chen , Aditya Modi , Akshay Krishnamurthy , Nan Jiang , Alekh Agarwal

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

Model-based reinforcement learning (RL) is appealing because (i) it enables planning and thus more strategic exploration, and (ii) by decoupling dynamics from rewards, it enables fast transfer to new reward functions. However, learning an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-14 Evan Zheran Liu , Ramtin Keramati , Sudarshan Seshadri , Kelvin Guu , Panupong Pasupat , Emma Brunskill , Percy Liang

State-of-the-art reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms typically use random sampling (e.g., $\epsilon$-greedy) for exploration, but this method fails on hard exploration tasks like Montezuma's Revenge. To address the challenge of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-21 Eric Chen , Zhang-Wei Hong , Joni Pajarinen , Pulkit Agrawal

Exploration of indoor environments has recently experienced a significant interest, also thanks to the introduction of deep neural agents built in a hierarchical fashion and trained with Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) on simulated…

We study the policy evaluation problem in an online multi-reward multi-policy discounted setting, where multiple reward functions must be evaluated simultaneously for different policies. We adopt an $(\epsilon,\delta)$-PAC perspective to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-19 Alessio Russo , Aldo Pacchiano

Modern reinforcement learning (RL) commonly engages practical problems with large state spaces, where function approximation must be deployed to approximate either the value function or the policy. While recent progresses in RL theory…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-14 Chi Jin , Qinghua Liu , Tiancheng Yu

Markov decision processes (MDPs) are a well studied framework for solving sequential decision making problems under uncertainty. Exact methods for solving MDPs based on dynamic programming such as policy iteration and value iteration are…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2015-09-09 Yanping Huang

Exploration in environments with sparse rewards has been a persistent problem in reinforcement learning (RL). Many tasks are natural to specify with a sparse reward, and manually shaping a reward function can result in suboptimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-02-27 Ashvin Nair , Bob McGrew , Marcin Andrychowicz , Wojciech Zaremba , Pieter Abbeel

We study offline Reinforcement Learning in large infinite-horizon discounted Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) when the reward and transition models are linearly realizable under a known feature map. Starting from the classic linear-program…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-24 Gergely Neu , Nneka Okolo