Related papers: Follow your Nose: Using General Value Functions fo…
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…
Efficient exploration is necessary to achieve good sample efficiency for reinforcement learning in general. From small, tabular settings such as gridworlds to large, continuous and sparse reward settings such as robotic object manipulation…
This paper reviews exploration techniques in deep reinforcement learning. Exploration techniques are of primary importance when solving sparse reward problems. In sparse reward problems, the reward is rare, which means that the agent will…
We study the use of randomized value functions to guide deep exploration in reinforcement learning. This offers an elegant means for synthesizing statistically and computationally efficient exploration with common practical approaches to…
Efficient exploration in reinforcement learning is a challenging problem commonly addressed through intrinsic rewards. Recent prominent approaches are based on state novelty or variants of artificial curiosity. However, directly applying…
General Value Functions (GVFs) (Sutton et al., 2011) represent predictive knowledge in reinforcement learning. Each GVF computes the expected return for a given policy, based on a unique reward. Existing methods relying on fixed behavior…
Deep reinforcement learning in partially observable environments is a difficult task in itself, and can be further complicated by a sparse reward signal. Most tasks involving navigation in three-dimensional environments provide the agent…
We study the problem of sample efficient reinforcement learning, where prior data such as demonstrations are provided for initialization in lieu of a dense reward signal. A natural approach is to incorporate an imitation learning objective,…
Optimistic value estimates provide one mechanism for directed exploration in reinforcement learning (RL). The agent acts greedily with respect to an estimate of the value plus what can be seen as a value bonus. The value bonus can be…
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…
Model free reinforcement learning suffers from the high sampling complexity inherent to robotic manipulation or locomotion tasks. Most successful approaches typically use random sampling strategies which leads to slow policy convergence. In…
We consider the inventory management problem, where the goal is to balance conflicting objectives such as availability and wastage of a large range of products in a store. We propose a reinforcement learning (RL) approach that utilises…
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…
The objective of a reinforcement learning agent is to discover better actions through exploration. However, typical exploration techniques aim to maximize rewards, often incurring high costs in both exploration and learning processes. We…
Controlling high-dimensional systems in biological and robotic applications is challenging due to expansive state-action spaces, where effective exploration is critical. Commonly used exploration strategies in reinforcement learning are…
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,…
While a powerful and promising approach, deep reinforcement learning (DRL) still suffers from sample inefficiency, which can be notably improved by resorting to more sophisticated techniques to address the exploration-exploitation dilemma.…
Reinforcement learning (RL) agents improve through trial-and-error, but when reward is sparse and the agent cannot discover successful action sequences, learning stagnates. This has been a notable problem in training deep RL agents to…
In environments with sparse or delayed rewards, reinforcement learning (RL) incurs high sample complexity due to the large number of interactions needed for learning. This limitation has motivated the use of large language models (LLMs) for…
Numerous past works have tackled the problem of task-driven navigation. But, how to effectively explore a new environment to enable a variety of down-stream tasks has received much less attention. In this work, we study how agents can…