Related papers: Exploration via Elliptical Episodic Bonuses
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…
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…
Much of the current work on reinforcement learning studies episodic settings, where the agent is reset between trials to an initial state distribution, often with well-shaped reward functions. Non-episodic settings, where the agent must…
Conveying complex objectives to reinforcement learning (RL) agents often requires meticulous reward engineering. Preference-based RL methods are able to learn a more flexible reward model based on human preferences by actively incorporating…
Bugs in popular distributed protocol implementations have been the source of many downtimes in popular internet services. We describe a randomized testing approach for distributed protocol implementations based on reinforcement learning.…
State-of-the-art reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms typically use random sampling (e.g., $\epsilon$-greedy) for exploration, but this method fails on hard exploration tasks like Montezuma's Revenge. To address the challenge of…
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…
This paper studies reward-agnostic exploration in reinforcement learning (RL) -- a scenario where the learner is unware of the reward functions during the exploration stage -- and designs an algorithm that improves over the state of the…
A key challenge to deploying reinforcement learning in practice is avoiding excessive (harmful) exploration in individual episodes. We propose a natural constraint on exploration -- \textit{uniformly} outperforming a conservative policy…
Exploration bonuses in reinforcement learning guide long-horizon exploration by defining custom intrinsic objectives. Several exploration objectives like count-based bonuses, pseudo-counts, and state-entropy maximization are non-stationary…
Intrinsic rewards play a central role in handling the exploration-exploitation trade-off when designing sequential decision-making algorithms, in both foundational theory and state-of-the-art deep reinforcement learning. The LinUCB…
This paper investigates conservative exploration in reinforcement learning where the performance of the learning agent is guaranteed to be above a certain threshold throughout the learning process. It focuses on the tabular episodic Markov…
The study of exploration in the domain of decision making has a long history but remains actively debated. From the vast literature that addressed this topic for decades under various points of view (e.g., developmental psychology,…
Classical sampling-based motion planners like the RRTs suffer from inefficiencies, particularly in cluttered or high-dimensional spaces, due to their reliance on undirected, random sampling. This paper introduces the Episodic RRT, a novel…
In Model-Based Reinforcement Learning (MBRL), incorporating causal structures into dynamics models provides agents with a structured understanding of the environments, enabling efficient decision. Empowerment as an intrinsic motivation…
Unsupervised Reinforcement Learning (RL) provides a promising paradigm for learning useful behaviors via reward-free per-training. Existing methods for unsupervised RL mainly conduct empowerment-driven skill discovery or entropy-based…
When a person is not satisfied with how a robot performs a task, they can intervene to correct it. Reward learning methods enable the robot to adapt its reward function online based on such human input, but they rely on handcrafted…
We introduce a new count-based optimistic exploration algorithm for Reinforcement Learning (RL) that is feasible in environments with high-dimensional state-action spaces. The success of RL algorithms in these domains depends crucially on…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) has been widely used to solve tasks where the environment consistently provides a dense reward value. However, in real-world scenarios, rewards can often be poorly defined or sparse. Auxiliary signals are…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) is known to be often unsuccessful in environments with sparse extrinsic rewards. A possible countermeasure is to endow RL agents with an intrinsic reward function, or 'intrinsic motivation', which rewards the…