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Pure exploration in bandits formalises multiple real-world problems, such as tuning hyper-parameters or conducting user studies to test a set of items, where different safety, resource, and fairness constraints on the decision space…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-05 Udvas Das , Debabrota Basu

In sparse linear bandits, a learning agent sequentially selects an action and receive reward feedback, and the reward function depends linearly on a few coordinates of the covariates of the actions. This has applications in many real-world…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-11-21 Kyoungseok Jang , Chicheng Zhang , Kwang-Sung Jun

In toxicology research, experiments are often conducted to determine the effect of toxicant exposure on the behavior of mice, where mice are randomized to receive the toxicant or not. In particular, in fixed interval experiments, one…

We introduce Random Latent Exploration (RLE), a simple yet effective exploration strategy in reinforcement learning (RL). On average, RLE outperforms noise-based methods, which perturb the agent's actions, and bonus-based exploration, which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-28 Srinath Mahankali , Zhang-Wei Hong , Ayush Sekhari , Alexander Rakhlin , Pulkit Agrawal

We investigate the increasingly important and common game-solving setting where we do not have an explicit description of the game but only oracle access to it through gameplay, such as in financial or military simulations and computer…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-02-26 Carlos Martin , Tuomas Sandholm

Effective and intelligent exploration has been an unresolved problem for reinforcement learning. Most contemporary reinforcement learning relies on simple heuristic strategies such as $\epsilon$-greedy exploration or adding Gaussian noise…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-19 Muhammad Usama , Dong Eui Chang

Many real-world robot learning problems, such as pick-and-place or arriving at a destination, can be seen as a problem of reaching a goal state as soon as possible. These problems, when formulated as episodic reinforcement learning tasks,…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-07-10 Gautham Vasan , Yan Wang , Fahim Shahriar , James Bergstra , Martin Jagersand , A. Rupam Mahmood

Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents require the specification of a reward signal for learning behaviours. However, introduction of corrupt or stochastic rewards can yield high variance in learning. Such corruption may be a direct result of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-11-09 Joshua Romoff , Peter Henderson , Alexandre Piché , Vincent Francois-Lavet , Joelle Pineau

Data generation and labeling are usually an expensive part of learning for robotics. While active learning methods are commonly used to tackle the former problem, preference-based learning is a concept that attempts to solve the latter by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-10-11 Erdem Bıyık , Dorsa Sadigh

Exploration is a fundamental problem in robotics. While sampling-based planners have shown high performance, they are oftentimes compute intensive and can exhibit high variance. To this end, we propose to directly learn the underlying…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-07-15 Lukas Schmid , Chao Ni , Yuliang Zhong , Roland Siegwart , Olov Andersson

Recently, deep multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) has gained significant popularity due to its success in various cooperative multi-agent tasks. However, exploration still remains a challenging problem in MARL due to the partial…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-17 Yonghyeon Jo , Sunwoo Lee , Junghyuk Yeom , Seungyul Han

Designing robust reinforcement learning (RL) agents in the presence of imperfect reward signals remains a core challenge. In practice, agents are often trained with proxy rewards that only approximate the true objective, leaving them…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-15 Zixuan Liu , Xiaolin Sun , Zizhan Zheng

Efficient exploration remains one of the longstanding problems of deep reinforcement learning. Instead of depending solely on extrinsic rewards from the environments, existing methods use intrinsic rewards to enhance exploration. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-09 SuMin Oh , WanSoo Kim , HyunJin Kim

Sparse-reward reinforcement learning (RL) remains fundamentally hard: without structure, any agent needs $\Omega(|\mathcal{S}||\mathcal{A}|/p)$ samples to recover rewards. We introduce Policy-Aware Matrix Completion (PAMC) as a first…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-10 Ibne Farabi Shihab , Sanjeda Akter , Anuj Sharma

In the absence of extensive human-annotated data for complex reasoning tasks, self-improvement -- where models are trained on their own outputs -- has emerged as a primary method for enhancing performance. However, the critical factors…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-03-05 Weihao Zeng , Yuzhen Huang , Lulu Zhao , Yijun Wang , Zifei Shan , Junxian He

This paper studies offline reinforcement learning with linear function approximation in a setting with decision-theoretic, but not estimation sparsity. The structural restrictions of the data-generating process presume that the transitions…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-01-24 Angela Zhou

Efficient exploration is important for reinforcement learners to achieve high rewards. In multi-agent systems, coordinated exploration and behaviour is critical for agents to jointly achieve optimal outcomes. In this paper, we introduce a…

Discovering successful coordinated behaviors is a central challenge in Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) since it requires exploring a joint action space that grows exponentially with the number of agents. In this paper, we propose…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-14 Ammar Fayad , Majd Ibrahim

Autonomous exploration has many important applications. However, classic information gain-based or frontier-based exploration only relies on the robot current state to determine the immediate exploration goal, which lacks the capability of…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-05-26 Yafei Hu , Junyi Geng , Chen Wang , John Keller , Sebastian Scherer

Controllable Markov chains describe the dynamics of sequential decision making tasks and are the central component in optimal control and reinforcement learning. In this work, we give the general form of an optimal policy for learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-24 Peter N. Loxley