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Solving real-life sequential decision making problems under partial observability involves an exploration-exploitation problem. To be successful, an agent needs to efficiently gather valuable information about the state of the world for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-03 Haiyan Yin , Yingzhen Li , Sinno Jialin Pan , Cheng Zhang , Sebastian Tschiatschek

The capability to widely sample the state and action spaces is a key ingredient toward building effective reinforcement learning algorithms. The variational optimization principles exposed in this paper emphasize the importance of an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-25 Emmanuel Daucé

Most reinforcement learning algorithms take advantage of an experience replay buffer to repeatedly train on samples the agent has observed in the past. Not all samples carry the same amount of significance and simply assigning equal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-02 Shivakanth Sujit , Somjit Nath , Pedro H. M. Braga , Samira Ebrahimi Kahou

Exploration algorithms for reinforcement learning typically replace or augment the reward function with an additional ``intrinsic'' reward that trains the agent to seek previously unseen states of the environment. Here, we consider an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Kevin McKee , Eric Alt , Andrew Grebenisan , Mick van Gelderen , Gary Miguel

Reinforcement learning has achieved remarkable success in perfect information games such as Go and Atari, enabling agents to compete at the highest levels against human players. However, research in reinforcement learning for imperfect…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-24 Jiamian Li

Most successful information extraction systems operate with access to a large collection of documents. In this work, we explore the task of acquiring and incorporating external evidence to improve extraction accuracy in domains where the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2016-09-29 Karthik Narasimhan , Adam Yala , Regina Barzilay

Balancing exploration and exploitation remains a central challenge in reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) for large language models (LLMs). Current RLVR methods often overemphasize exploitation, leading to entropy…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Liang Chen , Xueting Han , Qizhou Wang , Bo Han , Jing Bai , Hinrich Schutze , Kam-Fai Wong

We present a new algorithm that significantly improves the efficiency of exploration for deep Q-learning agents in dialogue systems. Our agents explore via Thompson sampling, drawing Monte Carlo samples from a Bayes-by-Backprop neural…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-11-29 Zachary C. Lipton , Xiujun Li , Jianfeng Gao , Lihong Li , Faisal Ahmed , Li Deng

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a powerful framework for decision-making in uncertain environments, but it often requires large amounts of data to learn an optimal policy. We address this challenge by incorporating prior model knowledge to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-29 J. S. van Hulst , W. P. M. H. Heemels , D. J. Antunes

We present a new algorithm that significantly improves the efficiency of exploration for deep Q-learning agents in dialogue systems. Our agents explore via Thompson sampling, drawing Monte Carlo samples from a Bayes-by-Backprop neural…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-11-21 Zachary Lipton , Xiujun Li , Jianfeng Gao , Lihong Li , Faisal Ahmed , Li Deng

The tradeoff between accuracy and speed is considered fundamental to individual and collective decision-making. In this paper, we focus on collective estimation as an example of collective decision-making. The task is to estimate the…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2022-01-19 Mohsen Raoufi , Heiko Hamann , Pawel Romanczuk

Equipping artificial agents with useful exploration mechanisms remains a challenge to this day. Humans, on the other hand, seem to manage the trade-off between exploration and exploitation effortlessly. In the present article, we put…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-15 Marcel Binz , Eric Schulz

Experience replay enables data-efficient learning from past experiences in online reinforcement learning agents. Traditionally, experiences were sampled uniformly from a replay buffer, regardless of differences in experience-specific…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-16 Leonard S. Pleiss , Tobias Sutter , Maximilian Schiffer

High sample complexity remains a barrier to the application of reinforcement learning (RL), particularly in multi-agent systems. A large body of work has demonstrated that exploration mechanisms based on the principle of optimism under…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-08-02 Robert Loftin , Aadirupa Saha , Sam Devlin , Katja Hofmann

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

We consider an agent who is involved in a Markov decision process and receives a vector of outcomes every round. Her objective is to maximize a global concave reward function on the average vectorial outcome. The problem models applications…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-17 Wang Chi Cheung

Reinforcement Learning algorithms aim to learn optimal control strategies through iterative interactions with an environment. A critical element in this process is the experience replay buffer, which stores past experiences, allowing the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-31 Hoda Yamani , Yuning Xing , Lee Violet C. Ong , Bruce A. MacDonald , Henry Williams

Exploration is a difficult challenge in reinforcement learning and is of prime importance in sparse reward environments. However, many of the state of the art deep reinforcement learning algorithms, that rely on epsilon-greedy, fail on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-10-15 Navneet Madhu Kumar

Learning complex robot behavior through interactions with the environment necessitates principled exploration. Effective strategies should prioritize exploring regions of the state-action space that maximize rewards, with optimistic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-12 Jasmine Bayrooti , Carl Henrik Ek , Amanda Prorok

We study reinforcement learning from human feedback in general Markov decision processes, where agents learn from trajectory-level preference comparisons. A central challenge in this setting is to design algorithms that select informative…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-05 Andreas Schlaginhaufen , Reda Ouhamma , Maryam Kamgarpour