Related papers: Multi-Stage Episodic Control for Strategic Explora…

Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms have led to recent successes in solving complex games, such as Atari or Starcraft, and to a huge impact in real-world applications, such as cybersecurity or autonomous driving. In the side of the…

Reinforcement learning with sparse rewards is still an open challenge. Classic methods rely on getting feedback via extrinsic rewards to train the agent, and in situations where this occurs very rarely the agent learns slowly or cannot…

Model-free continuous control for robot navigation tasks using Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) that relies on noisy policies for exploration is sensitive to the density of rewards. In practice, robots are usually deployed in cluttered…

Despite the considerable attention given to the questions of \textit{how much} and \textit{how to} explore in deep reinforcement learning, the investigation into \textit{when} to explore remains relatively less researched. While more…

We present BYOL-Explore, a conceptually simple yet general approach for curiosity-driven exploration in visually-complex environments. BYOL-Explore learns a world representation, the world dynamics, and an exploration policy all-together by…

A major challenge in reinforcement learning is the design of exploration strategies, especially for environments with sparse reward structures and continuous state and action spaces. Intuitively, if the reinforcement signal is very scarce,…

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…

Exploration remains a central challenge for reinforcement learning (RL). Virtually all existing methods share the feature of a monolithic behaviour policy that changes only gradually (at best). In contrast, the exploratory behaviours of…

Exploration remains a key challenge in deep reinforcement learning (RL). Optimism in the face of uncertainty is a well-known heuristic with theoretical guarantees in the tabular setting, but how best to translate the principle to deep…

Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) algorithms often struggle to find strategies close to Pareto optimal Nash Equilibrium, owing largely to the lack of efficient exploration. The problem is exacerbated in sparse-reward settings,…

Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning (HRL) exploits temporally extended actions, or options, to make decisions from a higher-dimensional perspective to alleviate the sparse reward problem, one of the most challenging problems in…

We investigate the benefits of heterogeneity in multi-agent explore-exploit decision making where the goal of the agents is to maximize cumulative group reward. To do so we study a class of distributed stochastic bandit problems in which…

Sequential decision tasks with incomplete information are characterized by the exploration problem; namely the trade-off between further exploration for learning more about the environment and immediate exploitation of the accrued…

AlphaZero is a self-play reinforcement learning algorithm that achieves superhuman play in chess, shogi, and Go via policy iteration. To be an effective policy improvement operator, AlphaZero's search requires accurate value estimates for…

We introduce DreamerV3-XP, an extension of DreamerV3 that improves exploration and learning efficiency. This includes (i) a prioritized replay buffer, scoring trajectories by return, reconstruction loss, and value error and (ii) an…

Text-based games are suitable test-beds for designing agents that can learn by interaction with the environment in the form of natural language text. Very recently, deep reinforcement learning based agents have been successfully applied for…

Recent years have witnessed a tremendous improvement of deep reinforcement learning. However, a challenging problem is that an agent may suffer from inefficient exploration, particularly for on-policy methods. Previous exploration methods…

Text-based games provide valuable environments for language-based autonomous agents. However, planning-then-learning paradigms, such as those combining Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) and reinforcement learning (RL), are notably…

Exploration is critical to a reinforcement learning agent's performance in its given environment. Prior exploration methods are often based on using heuristic auxiliary predictions to guide policy behavior, lacking a mathematically-grounded…

Exploration is a fundamental aspect of reinforcement learning (RL), and its effectiveness is a deciding factor in the performance of RL algorithms, especially when facing sparse extrinsic rewards. Recent studies have shown the effectiveness…