Related papers: Adapting the Exploration Rate for Value-of-Informa…
We study the use of randomized value functions to guide deep exploration in reinforcement learning. This offers an elegant means for synthesizing statistically and computationally efficient exploration with common practical approaches to…
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…
In deep reinforcement learning (RL) research, there has been a concerted effort to design more efficient and productive exploration methods while solving sparse-reward problems. These exploration methods often share common principles (e.g.,…
Research on exploration in reinforcement learning, as applied to Atari 2600 game-playing, has emphasized tackling difficult exploration problems such as Montezuma's Revenge (Bellemare et al., 2016). Recently, bonus-based exploration…
An effective approach to exploration in reinforcement learning is to rely on an agent's uncertainty over the optimal policy, which can yield near-optimal exploration strategies in tabular settings. However, in non-tabular settings that…
Humans learn to play video games significantly faster than the state-of-the-art reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms. People seem to build simple models that are easy to learn to support planning and strategic exploration. Inspired by…
Exploration is essential in reinforcement learning as an agent relies on trial and error to learn an optimal policy. However, when rewards are sparse, naive exploration strategies, like noise injection, are often insufficient. Intrinsic…
This work focuses on the entropy-regularized independent natural policy gradient (NPG) algorithm in multi-agent reinforcement learning. In this work, agents are assumed to have access to an oracle with exact policy evaluation and seek to…
Determining what experience to generate to best facilitate learning (i.e. exploration) is one of the distinguishing features and open challenges in reinforcement learning. The advent of distributed agents that interact with parallel…
Efficient exploration remains a major challenge for reinforcement learning. One reason is that the variability of the returns often depends on the current state and action, and is therefore heteroscedastic. Classical exploration strategies…
Multi-agent reinforcement learning serves as an effective tool for studying strategy adaptation in evolutionary games. Although prior work has integrated Q-learning with reputation mechanisms to promote cooperation, most existing algorithms…
Reward functions are central in specifying the task we want a reinforcement learning agent to perform. Given a task and desired optimal behavior, we study the problem of designing informative reward functions so that the designed rewards…
This paper considers simulation-based optimization of the performance of a regime-switching stochastic system over a finite set of feasible configurations. Inspired by the stochastic fictitious play learning rules in game theory, we propose…
Experience replay enables off-policy reinforcement learning (RL) agents to utilize past experiences to maximize the cumulative reward. Prioritized experience replay that weighs experiences by the magnitude of their temporal-difference error…
Reinforcement learning (RL) with sparse and deceptive rewards is challenging because non-zero rewards are rarely obtained. Hence, the gradient calculated by the agent can be stochastic and without valid information. Recent studies that…
Active perception approaches select future viewpoints by using some estimate of the information gain. An inaccurate estimate can be detrimental in critical situations, e.g., locating a person in distress. However the true information gained…
We show that reinforcement learning agents that learn by surprise (surprisal) get stuck at abrupt environmental transition boundaries because these transitions are difficult to learn. We propose a counter-intuitive solution that we call…
Training models to map natural language instructions to programs given target world supervision only requires searching for good programs at training time. Search is commonly done using beam search in the space of partial programs or…
Search in test time is often used to improve the performance of reinforcement learning algorithms. Performing theoretically sound search in fully adversarial two-player games with imperfect information is notoriously difficult and requires…
The infamous exploration-exploitation dilemma is one of the oldest and most important problems in reinforcement learning (RL). Deliberate and effective exploration is necessary for RL agents to succeed in most environments. However, until…