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We study the problem of learning exploration-exploitation strategies that effectively adapt to dynamic environments, where the task may change over time. While RNN-based policies could in principle represent such strategies, in practice…

The performance of off-policy learning, including deep Q-learning and deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG), critically depends on the choice of the exploration policy. Existing exploration methods are mostly based on adding noise to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-03-28 Tianbing Xu , Qiang Liu , Liang Zhao , Jian Peng

Policy optimization methods remain a powerful workhorse in empirical Reinforcement Learning (RL), with a focus on neural policies that can easily reason over complex and continuous state and/or action spaces. Theoretical understanding of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-23 Fei Feng , Wotao Yin , Alekh Agarwal , Lin F. Yang

Researchers have demonstrated that Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) is a powerful tool for finding policies that perform well on complex robotic systems. However, these policies are often unpredictable and can induce highly variable…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-03-08 Sean Gillen , Asutay Ozmen , Katie Byl

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…

Robotics · Computer Science 2019-08-13 Miroslav Bogdanovic , Ludovic Righetti

In the era of deep reinforcement learning, making progress is more complex, as the collected experience must be compressed into a deep model for future exploitation and sampling. Many papers have shown that training a deep learning policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-05 Glen Berseth

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…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-02-24 Mingyu Cai , Erfan Aasi , Calin Belta , Cristian-Ioan Vasile

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-03 Pawel Ladosz , Lilian Weng , Minwoo Kim , Hyondong Oh

While learning in an unknown Markov Decision Process (MDP), an agent should trade off exploration to discover new information about the MDP, and exploitation of the current knowledge to maximize the reward. Although the agent will…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-16 Evrard Garcelon , Mohammad Ghavamzadeh , Alessandro Lazaric , Matteo Pirotta

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

Meta reinforcement learning (meta-RL) extracts knowledge from previous tasks and achieves fast adaptation to new tasks. Despite recent progress, efficient exploration in meta-RL remains a key challenge in sparse-reward tasks, as it requires…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-11-15 Jin Zhang , Jianhao Wang , Hao Hu , Tong Chen , Yingfeng Chen , Changjie Fan , Chongjie Zhang

A policy in deep reinforcement learning (RL), either deterministic or stochastic, is commonly parameterized as a Gaussian distribution alone, limiting the learned behavior to be unimodal. However, the nature of many practical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-20 SM Mazharul Islam , Manfred Huber

Proximal policy optimization (PPO) algorithm is a deep reinforcement learning algorithm with outstanding performance, especially in continuous control tasks. But the performance of this method is still affected by its exploration ability.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-12 Junwei Zhang , Zhenghao Zhang , Shuai Han , Shuai Lü

This paper bridges reinforcement learning (RL) and risk-sensitive stochastic control by introducing a tractable exploration mechanism for policy search in risk-sensitive portfolio management, with known and unknown model parameters, that…

Portfolio Management · Quantitative Finance 2026-03-03 Sebastien Lleo , Wolfgang Runggaldier

We present a scalable and effective exploration strategy based on Thompson sampling for reinforcement learning (RL). One of the key shortcomings of existing Thompson sampling algorithms is the need to perform a Gaussian approximation of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-19 Haque Ishfaq , Qingfeng Lan , Pan Xu , A. Rupam Mahmood , Doina Precup , Anima Anandkumar , Kamyar Azizzadenesheli

Recent advancements in deep reinforcement learning (RL) have demonstrated notable progress in sample efficiency, spanning both model-based and model-free paradigms. Despite the identification and mitigation of specific bottlenecks in prior…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-02 Yibo Wang , Jiang Zhao

Many real-world problems can be reduced to combinatorial optimization on a graph, where the subset or ordering of vertices that maximize some objective function must be found. With such tasks often NP-hard and analytically intractable,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-22 Thomas D. Barrett , William R. Clements , Jakob N. Foerster , A. I. Lvovsky

Model-based Reinforcement Learning estimates the true environment through a world model in order to approximate the optimal policy. This family of algorithms usually benefits from better sample efficiency than their model-free counterparts.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-27 Valentin Charvet , Bjørn Sand Jensen , Roderick Murray-Smith

Reinforcement learning (RL) with sparse and deceptive rewards is challenging because non-zero rewards are rarely obtained. Hence, the gradient calculated by the agent can be stochastic and without valid information. Recent studies that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-08 Guojian Wang , Faguo Wu , Xiao Zhang , Jianxiang Liu

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-24 Akane Tsuboya , Yu Kono , Tatsuji Takahashi