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We propose a recurrent RL agent with an episodic exploration mechanism that helps discovering good policies in text-based game environments. We show promising results on a set of generated text-based games of varying difficulty where the…

We analyze the problem of using Explore-Exploit techniques to improve precision in multi-result ranking systems such as web search, query autocompletion and news recommendation. Adopting an exploration policy directly online, without…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-04-30 Dragomir Yankov , Pavel Berkhin , Lihong Li

Numerous heuristics and advanced approaches have been proposed for exploration in different settings for deep reinforcement learning. Noise-based exploration generally fares well with dense-shaped rewards and bonus-based exploration with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-22 Sebastian Griesbach , Carlo D'Eramo

Exploration under sparse reward is a long-standing challenge of model-free reinforcement learning. The state-of-the-art methods address this challenge by introducing intrinsic rewards to encourage exploration in novel states or uncertain…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-05 Daochen Zha , Wenye Ma , Lei Yuan , Xia Hu , Ji Liu

Sparse rewards and long time horizons remain challenging for reinforcement learning algorithms. Exploration bonuses can help in sparse reward settings by encouraging agents to explore the state space, while hierarchical approaches can…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-08-13 Willie McClinton , Andrew Levy , George Konidaris

Inspired by human-like behaviors for navigation: first searching to explore unknown areas before discovering the target, and then the pathfinding of moving towards the discovered target, recent studies design parallel submodules to achieve…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-07-23 Yanwei Zheng , Shaopu Feng , Bowen Huang , Chuanlin Lan , Xiao Zhang , Dongxiao Yu

Text-based games are a popular testbed for language-based reinforcement learning (RL). In previous work, deep Q-learning is commonly used as the learning agent. Q-learning algorithms are challenging to apply to complex real-world domains…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-28 Weichen Li , Rati Devidze , Sophie Fellenz

In this paper, we propose an enhanced approach for Rapid Exploration and eXploitation for AI Agents called REX. Existing AutoGPT-style techniques have inherent limitations, such as a heavy reliance on precise descriptions for…

Exploration is widely regarded as one of the most challenging aspects of reinforcement learning (RL), with many naive approaches succumbing to exponential sample complexity. To isolate the challenges of exploration, we propose a new…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-10 Chi Jin , Akshay Krishnamurthy , Max Simchowitz , Tiancheng Yu

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.,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-09-02 Yan Song , Yingfeng Chen , Yujing Hu , Changjie Fan

This paper investigates conservative exploration in reinforcement learning where the performance of the learning agent is guaranteed to be above a certain threshold throughout the learning process. It focuses on the tabular episodic Markov…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-14 Donghao Li , Ruiquan Huang , Cong Shen , Jing Yang

We introduce an online active exploration algorithm for data-efficiently learning an abstract symbolic model of an environment. Our algorithm is divided into two parts: the first part quickly generates an intermediate Bayesian symbolic…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-11-02 Garrett Andersen , George Konidaris

This paper studies the mechanisms, implications, and potential applications of the recently discovered class of Zero Determinant (ZD) strategies in iterated 2x2 games. These strategies were reported to successfully extort pure economic…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2013-08-13 Lars Roemheld

Efficient exploration remains a challenging research problem in reinforcement learning, especially when an environment contains large state spaces, deceptive local optima, or sparse rewards. To tackle this problem, we present a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-10-30 Zhang-Wei Hong , Tzu-Yun Shann , Shih-Yang Su , Yi-Hsiang Chang , Chun-Yi Lee

An agent learning through interactions should balance its action selection process between probing the environment to discover new rewards and using the information acquired in the past to adopt useful behaviour. This trade-off is usually…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-07-02 Lucas Beyer , Damien Vincent , Olivier Teboul , Sylvain Gelly , Matthieu Geist , Olivier Pietquin

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-14 Zhao Yang , Thomas M. Moerland , Mike Preuss , Aske Plaat

In recent years, state-of-the-art game-playing agents often involve policies that are trained in self-playing processes where Monte Carlo tree search (MCTS) algorithms and trained policies iteratively improve each other. The strongest…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-16 Dennis J. N. J. Soemers , Éric Piette , Matthew Stephenson , Cameron Browne

The promise of reinforcement learning is to solve complex sequential decision problems autonomously by specifying a high-level reward function only. However, reinforcement learning algorithms struggle when, as is often the case, simple and…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-09-17 Adrien Ecoffet , Joost Huizinga , Joel Lehman , Kenneth O. Stanley , Jeff Clune

Exploration is a crucial skill for in-context reinforcement learning in unknown environments. However, it remains unclear if large language models can effectively explore a partially hidden state space. This work isolates exploration as the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-26 Tim Grams , Patrick Betz , Sascha Marton , Stefan Lüdtke , Christian Bartelt

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