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Related papers: SEREN: Knowing When to Explore and When to Exploit

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The exploration--exploitation trade-off in reinforcement learning (RL) is a well-known and much-studied problem that balances greedy action selection with novel experience, and the study of exploration methods is usually only considered in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-13 Jonathan C Balloch , Julia Kim , and Jessica L Inman , Mark O Riedl

Incomplete knowledge of the environment leads an agent to make decisions under uncertainty. One of the major dilemmas in Reinforcement Learning (RL) where an autonomous agent has to balance two contrasting needs in making its decisions is:…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-02-21 Valentina Zangirolami , Matteo Borrotti

We present a new model-based algorithm for reinforcement learning (RL) which consists of explicit exploration and exploitation phases, and is applicable in large or infinite state spaces. The algorithm maintains a set of dynamics models…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-03 Mikael Henaff

The Exploration-Exploitation tradeoff arises in Reinforcement Learning when one cannot tell if a policy is optimal. Then, there is a constant need to explore new actions instead of exploiting past experience. In practice, it is common to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-09-10 Lior Shani , Yonathan Efroni , Shie Mannor

The central tenet of reinforcement learning (RL) is that agents seek to maximize the sum of cumulative rewards. In contrast, active inference, an emerging framework within cognitive and computational neuroscience, proposes that agents act…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-02 Alexander Tschantz , Beren Millidge , Anil K. Seth , Christopher L. Buckley

Exploration in environments with sparse rewards remains a fundamental challenge in reinforcement learning (RL). Existing approaches such as curriculum learning and Go-Explore often rely on hand-crafted heuristics, while curiosity-driven…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Georgios Sotirchos , Zlatan Ajanović , Jens Kober

A reinforcement learning agent tries to maximize its cumulative payoff by interacting in an unknown environment. It is important for the agent to explore suboptimal actions as well as to pick actions with highest known rewards. Yet, in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-01-23 Reazul Hasan Russel

Exploration is essential for reinforcement learning (RL). To face the challenges of exploration, we consider a reward-free RL framework that completely separates exploration from exploitation and brings new challenges for exploration…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-11 Chuheng Zhang , Yuanying Cai , Longbo Huang , Jian Li

In this paper, a unified framework for exploration in reinforcement learning (RL) is proposed based on an option-critic model. The proposed framework learns to integrate a set of diverse exploration strategies so that the agent can…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-10 Woojun Kim , Jeonghye Kim , Youngchul Sung

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-19 Shanchuan Wan , Yujin Tang , Yingtao Tian , Tomoyuki Kaneko

Exploration is a fundamental challenge in reinforcement learning (RL). Many of the current exploration methods for deep RL use task-agnostic objectives, such as information gain or bonuses based on state visitation. However, many practical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-02-21 Abhishek Gupta , Russell Mendonca , YuXuan Liu , Pieter Abbeel , Sergey Levine

In many real-world applications of reinforcement learning (RL), performing actions requires consuming certain types of resources that are non-replenishable in each episode. Typical applications include robotic control with limited energy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-15 Zhihai Wang , Taoxing Pan , Qi Zhou , Jie Wang

Sparse reward is one of the biggest challenges in reinforcement learning (RL). In this paper, we propose a novel method called Generative Exploration and Exploitation (GENE) to overcome sparse reward. GENE automatically generates start…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-21 Jiechuan Jiang , Zongqing Lu

Bayesian reinforcement learning (RL) offers a principled and elegant approach for sequential decision making under uncertainty. Most notably, Bayesian agents do not face an exploration/exploitation dilemma, a major pathology of frequentist…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-26 Mattie Fellows , Brandon Kaplowitz , Christian Schroeder de Witt , Shimon Whiteson

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 strategy design is one of the challenging problems in reinforcement learning~(RL), especially when the environment contains a large state space or sparse rewards. During exploration, the agent tries to discover novel areas or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-07 Xiao Ma , Shen-Yi Zhao , Wu-Jun Li

Standard reinforcement learning (RL) agents never intelligently explore like a human (i.e. taking into account complex domain priors and adapting quickly based on previous exploration). Across episodes, RL agents struggle to perform even…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-06 Ben Norman , Jeff Clune

Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms aim to balance exploiting the current best strategy with exploring new options that could lead to higher rewards. Most common RL algorithms use undirected exploration, i.e., select random sequences of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-01 Bhavya Sukhija , Stelian Coros , Andreas Krause , Pieter Abbeel , Carmelo Sferrazza

Not having access to compact and meaningful representations is known to significantly increase the complexity of reinforcement learning (RL). For this reason, it can be useful to perform state representation learning (SRL) before tackling…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-16 Astrid Merckling , Nicolas Perrin-Gilbert , Alex Coninx , Stéphane Doncieux

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a powerful framework for decision-making in uncertain environments, but it often requires large amounts of data to learn an optimal policy. We address this challenge by incorporating prior model knowledge to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-29 J. S. van Hulst , W. P. M. H. Heemels , D. J. Antunes
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