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A default assumption in the design of reinforcement-learning algorithms is that a decision-making agent always explores to learn optimal behavior. In sufficiently complex environments that approach the vastness and scale of the real world,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-23 Dilip Arumugam , Saurabh Kumar , Ramki Gummadi , Benjamin Van Roy

One of the challenges in online reinforcement learning (RL) is that the agent needs to trade off the exploration of the environment and the exploitation of the samples to optimize its behavior. Whether we optimize for regret, sample…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-19 Jean Tarbouriech , Matteo Pirotta , Michal Valko , Alessandro Lazaric

On-policy reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms have demonstrated great potential in robotic control, where effective exploration is crucial for efficient and high-quality policy learning. However, how to encourage the agent to explore the…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-04-02 Leixin Chang , Xinchen Yao , Ben Liu , Liangjing Yang , Hua Chen

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…

Reinforcement learning allows solving complex tasks, however, the learning tends to be task-specific and the sample efficiency remains a challenge. We present Plan2Explore, a self-supervised reinforcement learning agent that tackles both…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-02 Ramanan Sekar , Oleh Rybkin , Kostas Daniilidis , Pieter Abbeel , Danijar Hafner , Deepak Pathak

In this paper, we propose a reinforcement learning-based algorithm for trajectory optimization for constrained dynamical systems. This problem is motivated by the fact that for most robotic systems, the dynamics may not always be known.…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-03-05 Kei Ota , Devesh K. Jha , Tomoaki Oiki , Mamoru Miura , Takashi Nammoto , Daniel Nikovski , Toshisada Mariyama

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-02-27 Ashvin Nair , Bob McGrew , Marcin Andrychowicz , Wojciech Zaremba , Pieter Abbeel

Designing reliable decision strategies for autonomous urban driving is challenging. Reinforcement learning (RL) has been used to automatically derive suitable behavior in uncertain environments, but it does not provide any guarantee on the…

We propose an exploration method that incorporates look-ahead search over basic learnt skills and their dynamics, and use it for reinforcement learning (RL) of manipulation policies . Our skills are multi-goal policies learned in isolation…

Robotics · Computer Science 2018-11-21 Arpit Agarwal , Katharina Muelling , Katerina Fragkiadaki

A precondition for the deployment of a Reinforcement Learning agent to a real-world system is to provide guarantees on the learning process. While a learning algorithm will eventually converge to a good policy, there are no guarantees on…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-12-27 Paul Daoudi , Mathias Formoso , Othman Gaizi , Achraf Azize , Evrard Garcelon

For real-world deployments, it is critical to allow robots to navigate in complex environments autonomously. Traditional methods usually maintain an internal map of the environment, and then design several simple rules, in conjunction with…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-04-16 Yuanyang Zhu , Zhi Wang , Chunlin Chen , Daoyi Dong

In many practical applications of RL, it is expensive to observe state transitions from the environment. For example, in the problem of plasma control for nuclear fusion, computing the next state for a given state-action pair requires…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-16 Viraj Mehta , Biswajit Paria , Jeff Schneider , Stefano Ermon , Willie Neiswanger

Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms are known to scale poorly to environments with many available actions, requiring numerous samples to learn an optimal policy. The traditional approach of considering the same fixed action space in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-15 Leo Ardon , Alberto Pozanco , Daniel Borrajo , Sumitra Ganesh

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

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) faces significant challenges in addressing the hard-exploration problems in tasks with sparse or deceptive rewards and large state spaces. These challenges severely limit the practical application of DRL.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-03 Guojian Wang , Faguo Wu , Xiao Zhang , Ning Guo , Zhiming Zheng

Balancing exploration and exploitation remains a key challenge in reinforcement learning (RL). State-of-the-art RL algorithms suffer from high sample complexity, particularly in the sparse reward case, where they can do no better than to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-22 Philippe Morere , Gilad Francis , Tom Blau , Fabio Ramos

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

Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents often struggle with inefficient exploration, particularly in environments with sparse rewards. Traditional exploration strategies can lead to slow learning and suboptimal performance because agents fail to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Gaurav Chaudhary , Laxmidhar Behera , Washim Uddin Mondal

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

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a framework to optimize a control policy using rewards that are revealed by the system as a response to a control action. In its standard form, RL involves a single agent that uses its policy to accomplish a…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2021-11-24 Juan Cervino , Juan Andres Bazerque , Miguel Calvo-Fullana , Alejandro Ribeiro