English
Related papers

Related papers: BYOL-Explore: Exploration by Bootstrapped Predicti…

200 papers

How do you incentivize self-interested agents to $\textit{explore}$ when they prefer to $\textit{exploit}$? We consider complex exploration problems, where each agent faces the same (but unknown) MDP. In contrast with traditional…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-21 Max Simchowitz , Aleksandrs Slivkins

The exploration-exploitation dilemma in reinforcement learning (RL) is a fundamental challenge to efficient RL algorithms. Existing algorithms for finite state and action discounted RL problems address this by assuming sufficient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-09 Caleb Ju , Guanghui Lan

We present an end-to-end procedure for embodied exploration inspired by two biological computations: predictive coding and uncertainty minimization. The procedure can be applied to exploration settings in a task-independent and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-14 Abdelrahman Sharafeldin , Nabil Imam , Hannah Choi

We address the challenge of efficient exploration in model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL), where the system dynamics are unknown and the RL agent must learn directly from online interactions. We propose Scalable and Optimistic MBRL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-26 Bhavya Sukhija , Lenart Treven , Carmelo Sferrazza , Florian Dörfler , Pieter Abbeel , Andreas Krause

In distributional reinforcement learning (RL), the estimated distribution of value function models both the parametric and intrinsic uncertainties. We propose a novel and efficient exploration method for deep RL that has two components. The…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-16 Borislav Mavrin , Shangtong Zhang , Hengshuai Yao , Linglong Kong , Kaiwen Wu , Yaoliang Yu

Count-based exploration algorithms are known to perform near-optimally when used in conjunction with tabular reinforcement learning (RL) methods for solving small discrete Markov decision processes (MDPs). It is generally thought that…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-12-06 Haoran Tang , Rein Houthooft , Davis Foote , Adam Stooke , Xi Chen , Yan Duan , John Schulman , Filip De Turck , Pieter Abbeel

Exploration is essential for general-purpose robotic learning, especially in open-ended environments where dense rewards, explicit goals, or task-specific supervision are scarce. Vision-language models (VLMs), with their semantic reasoning…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-09-12 Seungjae Lee , Daniel Ekpo , Haowen Liu , Furong Huang , Abhinav Shrivastava , Jia-Bin Huang

Bayesian optimization (BO) is an effective approach to optimize expensive black-box functions, that seeks to trade-off between exploitation (selecting parameters where the maximum is likely) and exploration (selecting parameters where we…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-10-19 Tristan Fauvel , Matthew Chalk

This paper investigates exploration strategies of Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) methods to learn navigation policies for mobile robots. In particular, we augment the normal external reward for training DRL algorithms with intrinsic…

Robotics · Computer Science 2018-05-15 Oleksii Zhelo , Jingwei Zhang , Lei Tai , Ming Liu , Wolfram Burgard

An active learning (AL) algorithm seeks to construct an effective classifier with a minimal number of labeled examples in a bootstrapping manner. While standard AL heuristics, such as selecting those points for annotation for which a…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2020-09-03 Ishani Mondal , Debasis Ganguly

Efficient exploration is critical in cooperative deep Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL). In this work, we propose an exploration method that effectively encourages cooperative exploration based on the idea of sequential…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-17 Xutong Zhao , Yangchen Pan , Chenjun Xiao , Sarath Chandar , Janarthanan Rajendran

This work presents an innovative solution for robotic odometry, path planning and exploration in wild unknown environments, focusing on digital modelling. The approach uses a minimum cost formulation with pseudo-randomly generated…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-03-29 Naizhong Zhang. Yaoqiang Pan , Yangwen Jin , Peiqi Jin , Kewei Hu , Xiao Huang , Hanwen Kang

Autonomous artificial agents must be able to learn behaviors in complex environments without humans to design tasks and rewards. Designing these functions for each environment is not feasible, thus, motivating the development of intrinsic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-20 Alana Santana , Paula P. Costa , Esther L. Colombini

Sparse-reward reinforcement learning (RL) can model a wide range of highly complex tasks. Solving sparse-reward tasks is RL's core premise, requiring efficient exploration coupled with long-horizon credit assignment, and overcoming these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Leander Diaz-Bone , Marco Bagatella , Jonas Hübotter , Andreas Krause

Terrestrial-aerial bimodal vehicles, which integrate the high mobility of aerial robots with the long endurance of ground robots, offer significant potential for autonomous exploration. Given the inherent energy and time constraints in…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-07-30 Yuman Gao , Ruibin Zhang , Tiancheng Lai , Yanjun Cao , Chao Xu , Fei Gao

In machine learning for sequential decision-making, an algorithmic agent learns to interact with an environment while receiving feedback in the form of a reward signal. However, in many unstructured real-world settings, such a reward signal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-25 Ellen Novoseller , Vinicius G. Goecks , David Watkins , Josh Miller , Nicholas Waytowich

In this paper, we propose SEA, a novel approach for active robot exploration through semantic map prediction and a reinforcement learning-based hierarchical exploration policy. Unlike existing learning-based methods that rely on one-step…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-12-12 Hongyu Ding , Xinyue Liang , Yudong Fang , You Wu , Jieqi Shi , Jing Huo , Wenbin Li , Jing Wu , Yu-Kun Lai , Yang Gao

The problem of inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) is relevant to a variety of tasks including value alignment and robot learning from demonstration. Despite significant algorithmic contributions in recent years, IRL remains an ill-posed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-18 Sreejith Balakrishnan , Quoc Phong Nguyen , Bryan Kian Hsiang Low , Harold Soh

Deploying Multimodal Large Language Models as the brain of embodied agents remains challenging, particularly under long-horizon observations and limited context budgets. Existing memory assisted methods often rely on textual summaries,…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Ji Li , Bo Wang , Jing Xia , Mingyi Li , Shiyan Hu

To achieve sample efficiency in reinforcement learning (RL), it necessitates efficiently exploring the underlying environment. Under the offline setting, addressing the exploration challenge lies in collecting an offline dataset with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-15 Shuang Qiu , Jieping Ye , Zhaoran Wang , Zhuoran Yang