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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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-30 Minjae Cho , Huy Trong Tran

Bugs in popular distributed protocol implementations have been the source of many downtimes in popular internet services. We describe a randomized testing approach for distributed protocol implementations based on reinforcement learning.…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-09-05 Andrea Borgarelli , Constantin Enea , Rupak Majumdar , Srinidhi Nagendra

We introduce and analyse two algorithms for exploration-exploitation in discrete and continuous Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) based on exploration bonuses. SCAL$^+$ is a variant of SCAL (Fruit et al., 2018) that performs efficient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-12-12 Jian Qian , Ronan Fruit , Matteo Pirotta , Alessandro Lazaric

We present a new algorithm based on posterior sampling for learning in constrained Markov decision processes (CMDP) in the infinite-horizon undiscounted setting. The algorithm achieves near-optimal regret bounds while being advantageous…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-28 Danil Provodin , Pratik Gajane , Mykola Pechenizkiy , Maurits Kaptein

A recent goal in the Reinforcement Learning (RL) framework is to choose a sequence of actions or a policy to maximize the reward collected or minimize the regret incurred in a finite time horizon. For several RL problems in operation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-08-18 K J Prabuchandran , Tejas Bodas , Theja Tulabandhula

Interactive recommender system (IRS) has drawn huge attention because of its flexible recommendation strategy and the consideration of optimal long-term user experiences. To deal with the dynamic user preference and optimize accumulative…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2020-06-19 Sijin Zhou , Xinyi Dai , Haokun Chen , Weinan Zhang , Kan Ren , Ruiming Tang , Xiuqiang He , Yong Yu

In Imitation Learning (IL), utilizing suboptimal and heterogeneous demonstrations presents a substantial challenge due to the varied nature of real-world data. However, standard IL algorithms consider these datasets as homogeneous, thereby…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-16 Mark Beliaev , Ramtin Pedarsani

Reinforcement learning (RL) plays a central role in improving the reasoning and alignment of large language models, yet its efficiency critically depends on how training data are selected. Existing online selection strategies predominantly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Xinyu Zhou , Boyu Zhu , Haotian Zhang , Huiming Wang , Zhijiang Guo

To acquire a new skill, humans learn better and faster if a tutor, based on their current knowledge level, informs them of how much attention they should pay to particular content or practice problems. Similarly, a machine learning model…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-18 Xinyi Wang , Hieu Pham , Paul Michel , Antonios Anastasopoulos , Jaime Carbonell , Graham Neubig

Reinforcement learning can solve decision-making problems and train an agent to behave in an environment according to a predesigned reward function. However, such an approach becomes very problematic if the reward is too sparse and so the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-06-12 Matej Pecháč , Michal Chovanec , Igor Farkaš

There is a strong link between the general concept of intelligence and the ability to collect and use information. The theory of Bayes-adaptive exploration offers an attractive optimality framework for training machines to perform complex…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-09-20 Luca Ambrogioni

We introduce Iterative Dual Reinforcement Learning (IDRL), a new method that takes an optimal discriminator-weighted imitation view of solving RL. Our method is motivated by a simple experiment in which we find training a discriminator…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-21 Haoran Xu , Shuozhe Li , Harshit Sikchi , Scott Niekum , Amy Zhang

Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD) and its variants have shown promising successes in approximate inference for complex distributions. In practice, we notice that the kernel used in SVGD-based methods has a decisive effect on the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-29 Qingzhong Ai , Shiyu Liu , Lirong He , Zenglin Xu

In this paper, we address the following problem: Given an offline demonstration dataset from an imperfect expert, what is the best way to leverage it to bootstrap online learning performance in MDPs. We first propose an Informed Posterior…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-18 Botao Hao , Rahul Jain , Dengwang Tang , Zheng Wen

Exploration is essential in reinforcement learning, particularly in environments where external rewards are sparse. Here we focus on exploration with intrinsic rewards, where the agent transiently augments the external rewards with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-26 Changmin Yu , Neil Burgess , Maneesh Sahani , Samuel J. Gershman

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

We introduce Random Reward Perturbation (RRP), a novel exploration strategy for reinforcement learning (RL). Our theoretical analyses demonstrate that adding zero-mean noise to environmental rewards effectively enhances policy diversity…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-11 Haozhe Ma , Guoji Fu , Zhengding Luo , Jiele Wu , Tze-Yun Leong

Direct policy gradient methods for reinforcement learning are a successful approach for a variety of reasons: they are model free, they directly optimize the performance metric of interest, and they allow for richly parameterized policies.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-14 Alekh Agarwal , Mikael Henaff , Sham Kakade , Wen Sun

Off-dynamics reinforcement learning (RL), where training and deployment transition dynamics are different, can be formulated as learning in a robust Markov decision process (RMDP) where uncertainties in transition dynamics are imposed.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-10 Yiting He , Zhishuai Liu , Weixin Wang , Pan Xu

Research in reinforcement learning has produced algorithms for optimal decision making under uncertainty that fall within two main types. The first employs a Bayesian framework, where optimality improves with increased computational time.…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2011-09-22 Christos Dimitrakakis