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Learning in sparse reward settings remains a challenge in Reinforcement Learning, which is often addressed by using intrinsic rewards. One promising strategy is inspired by human curiosity, requiring the agent to learn to predict the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-10-02 Gino Brunner , Manuel Fritsche , Oliver Richter , Roger Wattenhofer

For the problem of task-agnostic reinforcement learning (RL), an agent first collects samples from an unknown environment without the supervision of reward signals, then is revealed with a reward and is asked to compute a corresponding…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-16 Jingfeng Wu , Vladimir Braverman , Lin F. Yang

Recent advancements in agentic test-time scaling allow models to gather environmental feedback before committing to final actions. A key limitation of existing methods is that they typically employ undifferentiated exploration strategies,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Xingyuan Hua , Sheng Yue , Ju Ren

Exploration is a fundamental aspect of Reinforcement Learning, typically implemented using stochastic action-selection. Exploration, however, can be more efficient if directed toward gaining new world knowledge. Visit-counters have been…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-04-12 Leshem Choshen , Lior Fox , Yonatan Loewenstein

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

Reinforcement learning refers to a group of methods from artificial intelligence where an agent performs learning through trial and error. It differs from supervised learning, since reinforcement learning requires no explicit labels;…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-10-02 Nicolas Pröllochs , Stefan Feuerriegel

Data selection is essential for any data-based optimization technique, such as Reinforcement Learning. State-of-the-art sampling strategies for the experience replay buffer improve the performance of the Reinforcement Learning agent.…

Reward-free reinforcement learning (RL) considers the setting where the agent does not have access to a reward function during exploration, but must propose a near-optimal policy for an arbitrary reward function revealed only after…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-22 Andrew Wagenmaker , Yifang Chen , Max Simchowitz , Simon S. Du , Kevin Jamieson

In this paper, we investigate preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL), which enables reinforcement learning (RL) agents to learn from human feedback. This is particularly valuable when defining a fine-grain reward function is not…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Guojian Wang , Jianxiang Liu , Xinyuan Li , Faguo Wu , Xiao Zhang , Tianyuan Chen , Xuyang Chen

The exploration \& exploitation dilemma poses significant challenges in reinforcement learning (RL). Recently, curiosity-based exploration methods achieved great success in tackling hard-exploration problems. However, they necessitate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-06 Yiran Wang , Chenshu Liu , Yunfan Li , Sanae Amani , Bolei Zhou , Lin F. Yang

The process of discovery requires active exploration -- the act of collecting new and informative data. However, efficient autonomous exploration remains a major unsolved problem. The dominant paradigm addresses this challenge by using…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Zakaria Mhammedi , James Cohan

We introduce exploration potential, a quantity that measures how much a reinforcement learning agent has explored its environment class. In contrast to information gain, exploration potential takes the problem's reward structure into…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-11-21 Jan Leike

Reinforcement learning algorithms struggle when the reward signal is very sparse. In these cases, naive random exploration methods essentially rely on a random walk to stumble onto a rewarding state. Recent works utilize intrinsic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-14 Hyoungseok Kim , Jaekyeom Kim , Yeonwoo Jeong , Sergey Levine , Hyun Oh Song

Language model alignment (or, reinforcement learning) techniques that leverage active exploration -- deliberately encouraging the model to produce diverse, informative responses -- offer the promise of super-human capabilities. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-17 Dylan J. Foster , Zakaria Mhammedi , Dhruv Rohatgi

We present a representation-driven framework for reinforcement learning. By representing policies as estimates of their expected values, we leverage techniques from contextual bandits to guide exploration and exploitation. Particularly,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-23 Ofir Nabati , Guy Tennenholtz , Shie Mannor

Motivated by the prevailing paradigm of using unsupervised learning for efficient exploration in reinforcement learning (RL) problems [tang2017exploration,bellemare2016unifying], we investigate when this paradigm is provably efficient. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-02 Fei Feng , Ruosong Wang , Wotao Yin , Simon S. Du , Lin F. Yang

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

We propose a exploration mechanism of policy in Deep Reinforcement Learning, which is exploring more when agent needs, called Add Noise to Noise (AN2N). The core idea is: when the Deep Reinforcement Learning agent is in a state of poor…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-29 Youtian Guo , Qi Gao

Reinforcement learning usually uses the feedback rewards of environmental to train agents. But the rewards in the actual environment are sparse, and even some environments will not rewards. Most of the current methods are difficult to get…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-13 Kai Jiang , XiaoLong Qin

This paper considers the problem of efficient exploration of unseen environments, a key challenge in AI. We propose a `learning to explore' framework where we learn a policy from a distribution of environments. At test time, presented with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-30 Hanjun Dai , Yujia Li , Chenglong Wang , Rishabh Singh , Po-Sen Huang , Pushmeet Kohli