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Related papers: Exploration via Elliptical Episodic Bonuses

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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) trained language model agents with tool access are increasingly deployed in coding assistants, research tools, and autonomous systems. We introduce the Reward Hacking Benchmark (RHB), a suite of multi-step tasks…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-06 Kunvar Thaman

Traditional Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms assume the distribution of the data to be uniform or mostly uniform. However, this is not the case with most real-world applications like autonomous driving or in nature where animals roam.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-09 Dolton Fernandes , Pramod Kaushik , Harsh Shukla , Bapi Raju Surampudi

Restless multi-armed bandits (RMAB) play a central role in modeling sequential decision making problems under an instantaneous activation constraint that at most B arms can be activated at any decision epoch. Each restless arm is endowed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-03 Guojun Xiong , Jian Li

Despite the significant success at enabling robots with autonomous behaviors makes deep reinforcement learning a promising approach for robotic object search task, the deep reinforcement learning approach severely suffers from the nature…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-03-04 Xin Ye , Yezhou Yang

One of the bottlenecks preventing Deep Reinforcement Learning algorithms (DRL) from real-world applications is how to explore the environment and collect informative transitions efficiently. The present paper describes bounded exploration,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-10 Ting Qiao , Henry Williams , David Valencia , Bruce MacDonald

Unsupervised reinforcement learning (RL) studies how to leverage environment statistics to learn useful behaviors without the cost of reward engineering. However, a central challenge in unsupervised RL is to extract behaviors that…

We propose an algorithm for tabular episodic reinforcement learning with constraints. We provide a modular analysis with strong theoretical guarantees for settings with concave rewards and convex constraints, and for settings with hard…

In reinforcement learning (RL), continuing tasks refer to tasks where the agent-environment interaction is ongoing and can not be broken down into episodes. These tasks are suitable when environment resets are unavailable, agent-controlled,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-01-14 Yi Wan , Dmytro Korenkevych , Zheqing Zhu

All reinforcement learning algorithms must handle the trade-off between exploration and exploitation. Many state-of-the-art deep reinforcement learning methods use noise in the action selection, such as Gaussian noise in policy gradient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-04-05 Trevor Barron , Oliver Obst , Heni Ben Amor

Exploration is an extremely challenging problem in reinforcement learning, especially in high dimensional state and action spaces and when only sparse rewards are available. Effective representations can indicate which components of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-31 Giulia Vezzani , Abhishek Gupta , Lorenzo Natale , Pieter Abbeel

Positive affect has been linked to increased interest, curiosity and satisfaction in human learning. In reinforcement learning, extrinsic rewards are often sparse and difficult to define, intrinsically motivated learning can help address…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2021-04-06 Dean Zadok , Daniel McDuff , Ashish Kapoor

In cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), agents aim to achieve a common goal, such as defeating enemies or scoring a goal. Existing MARL algorithms are effective but still require significant learning time and often get…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-08 Hyungho Na , Yunkyeong Seo , Il-chul Moon

In real-world sequential decision making tasks like autonomous driving, robotics, and healthcare, learning from observed state-action trajectories is critical for tasks like imitation, classification, and clustering. For example,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-20 Zichang Ge , Changyu Chen , Arunesh Sinha , Pradeep Varakantham

Reward learning enables robots to learn adaptable behaviors from human input. Traditional methods model the reward as a linear function of hand-crafted features, but that requires specifying all the relevant features a priori, which is…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-01-19 Andreea Bobu , Marius Wiggert , Claire Tomlin , Anca D. Dragan

We consider the problem of reward learning for temporally extended tasks. For reward learning, inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) is a widely used paradigm. Given a Markov decision process (MDP) and a set of demonstrations for a task, IRL…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-07-14 Farzan Memarian , Zhe Xu , Bo Wu , Min Wen , Ufuk Topcu

In the last few years, the research activity around reinforcement learning tasks formulated over environments with sparse rewards has been especially notable. Among the numerous approaches proposed to deal with these hard exploration…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-22 Alain Andres , Esther Villar-Rodriguez , Javier Del Ser

Exploration in multi-task reinforcement learning is critical in training agents to deduce the underlying MDP. Many of the existing exploration frameworks such as $E^3$, $R_{max}$, Thompson sampling assume a single stationary MDP and are not…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2016-12-04 Sai Praveen Bangaru , JS Suhas , Balaraman Ravindran

Efficient exploration remains a challenging research problem in reinforcement learning, especially when an environment contains large state spaces, deceptive local optima, or sparse rewards. To tackle this problem, we present a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-10-30 Zhang-Wei Hong , Tzu-Yun Shann , Shih-Yang Su , Yi-Hsiang Chang , Chun-Yi Lee

Strong worst-case performance bounds for episodic reinforcement learning exist but fortunately in practice RL algorithms perform much better than such bounds would predict. Algorithms and theory that provide strong problem-dependent bounds…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-05 Andrea Zanette , Emma Brunskill