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Related papers: Exploration via Elliptical Episodic Bonuses

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We investigate a class of reinforcement learning dynamics where players adjust their strategies based on their actions' cumulative payoffs over time - specifically, by playing mixed strategies that maximize their expected cumulative payoff…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2016-02-10 Panayotis Mertikopoulos , William H. Sandholm

Episodic rewards present a significant challenge in reinforcement learning. While intrinsic reward methods have demonstrated effectiveness in single-agent rein-forcement learning scenarios, their application to multi-agent reinforcement…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-11-24 Kesheng Chen , Wenjian Luo , Bang Zhang , Zeping Yin , Zipeng Ye

Exploration is a difficult challenge in reinforcement learning and even recent state-of-the art curiosity-based methods rely on the simple epsilon-greedy strategy to generate novelty. We argue that pure random walks do not succeed to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-07-06 Fabio Pardo , Vitaly Levdik , Petar Kormushev

Large Language Models (LLMs) have made substantial strides in structured tasks through Reinforcement Learning (RL), demonstrating proficiency in mathematical reasoning and code generation. However, applying RL in broader domains like…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-10 Hao Sun , Yunyi Shen , Jean-Francois Ton , Mihaela van der Schaar

Maximum entropy reinforcement learning motivates agents to explore states and actions to maximize the entropy of some distribution, typically by providing additional intrinsic rewards proportional to that entropy function. In this paper, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-20 Adrien Bolland , Gaspard Lambrechts , Damien Ernst

Reinforcement learning algorithms are typically designed for discrete-time dynamics, even though the underlying real-world control systems are often continuous in time. In this paper, we study the problem of continuous-time reinforcement…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Klemens Iten , Lenart Treven , Bhavya Sukhija , Florian Dörfler , Andreas Krause

We propose a reinforcement learning agent to solve hard exploration games by learning a range of directed exploratory policies. We construct an episodic memory-based intrinsic reward using k-nearest neighbors over the agent's recent…

In human-in-the-loop reinforcement learning or environments where calculating a reward is expensive, the costly rewards can make learning efficiency challenging to achieve. The cost of obtaining feedback from humans or calculating expensive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-03 Muhammed Yusuf Satici , David L. Roberts

Despite the close connection between exploration and sample efficiency, most state of the art reinforcement learning algorithms include no considerations for exploration beyond maximizing the entropy of the policy. In this work we address…

Reinforcement Learning (RL) models have continually evolved to navigate the exploration - exploitation trade-off in uncertain Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). In this study, I leverage the principles of stochastic thermodynamics and system…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-22 Peeyush Kumar

Hierarchical reinforcement learning deals with the problem of breaking down large tasks into meaningful sub-tasks. Autonomous discovery of these sub-tasks has remained a challenging problem. We propose a novel method of learning sub-tasks…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-02-19 Saket Tiwari , M. Prannoy

While Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) is effective for deterministically checkable tasks, many vision-language tasks are partially verifiable, demanding multi-criteria supervision (e.g., perceptual details, reasoning…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Ya-Qi Yu , Hao Wang , Fangyu Hong , Xiangyang Qu , Gaojie Wu , Qiaoyu Luo , Nuo Xu , Huixin Wang , Wuheng Xu , Yongxin Liao , Zihao Chen , Haonan Li , Ziming Li , Dezhi Peng , Minghui Liao , Jihao Wu , Haoyu Ren , Dandan Tu

Reinforcement Learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has emerged as a primary learning paradigm for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of multi-modal large language models (MLLMs). However, during RL training, the enormous state space of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-13 Zhuoxu Huang , Mengxi Jia , Hao Sun , Xuelong Li , Jungong Han

Exploration strategy design is one of the challenging problems in reinforcement learning~(RL), especially when the environment contains a large state space or sparse rewards. During exploration, the agent tries to discover novel areas or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-07 Xiao Ma , Shen-Yi Zhao , Wu-Jun Li

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

Not having access to compact and meaningful representations is known to significantly increase the complexity of reinforcement learning (RL). For this reason, it can be useful to perform state representation learning (SRL) before tackling…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-16 Astrid Merckling , Nicolas Perrin-Gilbert , Alex Coninx , Stéphane Doncieux

One of the open challenges in Reinforcement Learning is the hard exploration problem in sparse reward environments. Various types of intrinsic rewards have been proposed to address this challenge by pushing towards diversity. This diversity…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-01-22 Aya Kayal , Eduardo Pignatelli , Laura Toni

In recent years, deep reinforcement learning has been shown to be adept at solving sequential decision processes with high-dimensional state spaces such as in the Atari games. Many reinforcement learning problems, however, involve…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-06-05 Yiming Zhang , Quan Ho Vuong , Kenny Song , Xiao-Yue Gong , Keith W. Ross

Off-policy sampling and experience replay are key for improving sample efficiency and scaling model-free temporal difference learning methods. When combined with function approximation, such as neural networks, this combination is known as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-13 Ray Jiang , Shangtong Zhang , Veronica Chelu , Adam White , Hado van Hasselt

One principled approach for provably efficient exploration is incorporating the upper confidence bound (UCB) into the value function as a bonus. However, UCB is specified to deal with linear and tabular settings and is incompatible with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-18 Chenjia Bai , Lingxiao Wang , Lei Han , Jianye Hao , Animesh Garg , Peng Liu , Zhaoran Wang