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Related papers: Exploration via Epistemic Value Estimation

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We propose a model-free reinforcement learning algorithm inspired by the popular randomized least squares value iteration (RLSVI) algorithm as well as the optimism principle. Unlike existing upper-confidence-bound (UCB) based approaches,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-27 Haque Ishfaq , Qiwen Cui , Viet Nguyen , Alex Ayoub , Zhuoran Yang , Zhaoran Wang , Doina Precup , Lin F. Yang

Efficient exploration in deep reinforcement learning remains a fundamental challenge, especially in environments characterized by high-dimensional states and sparse rewards. Traditional exploration strategies that rely on random local…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-24 Stergios Plataniotis , Charilaos Akasiadis , Georgios Chalkiadakis

Reinforcement learning with sparse rewards is still an open challenge. Classic methods rely on getting feedback via extrinsic rewards to train the agent, and in situations where this occurs very rarely the agent learns slowly or cannot…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-04 Simone Parisi , Davide Tateo , Maximilian Hensel , Carlo D'Eramo , Jan Peters , Joni Pajarinen

The Exploration-Exploitation tradeoff arises in Reinforcement Learning when one cannot tell if a policy is optimal. Then, there is a constant need to explore new actions instead of exploiting past experience. In practice, it is common to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-09-10 Lior Shani , Yonathan Efroni , Shie Mannor

Algorithms that tackle deep exploration -- an important challenge in reinforcement learning -- have relied on epistemic uncertainty representation through ensembles or other hypermodels, exploration bonuses, or visitation count…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-24 Vikranth Dwaracherla , Benjamin Van Roy

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…

A major challenge in reinforcement learning is exploration, when local dithering methods such as epsilon-greedy sampling are insufficient to solve a given task. Many recent methods have proposed to intrinsically motivate an agent to seek…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-15 Riley Simmons-Edler , Ben Eisner , Daniel Yang , Anthony Bisulco , Eric Mitchell , Sebastian Seung , Daniel Lee

We propose Ephemeral Value Adjusments (EVA): a means of allowing deep reinforcement learning agents to rapidly adapt to experience in their replay buffer. EVA shifts the value predicted by a neural network with an estimate of the value…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-10-19 Steven Hansen , Pablo Sprechmann , Alexander Pritzel , André Barreto , Charles Blundell

Sequential decision tasks with incomplete information are characterized by the exploration problem; namely the trade-off between further exploration for learning more about the environment and immediate exploitation of the accrued…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2013-02-21 Grigoris I. Karakoulas

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

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

The objective of a reinforcement learning agent is to discover better actions through exploration. However, typical exploration techniques aim to maximize rewards, often incurring high costs in both exploration and learning processes. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-24 Akane Tsuboya , Yu Kono , Tatsuji Takahashi

We consider the exploration/exploitation problem in reinforcement learning. For exploitation, it is well known that the Bellman equation connects the value at any time-step to the expected value at subsequent time-steps. In this paper we…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-10-23 Brendan O'Donoghue , Ian Osband , Remi Munos , Volodymyr Mnih

Expected free energy (EFE) is a central quantity in active inference which has recently gained popularity due to its intuitive decomposition of the expected value of control into a pragmatic and an epistemic component. While numerous…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-08-14 Ran Wei

This paper reviews exploration techniques in deep reinforcement learning. Exploration techniques are of primary importance when solving sparse reward problems. In sparse reward problems, the reward is rare, which means that the agent will…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-03 Pawel Ladosz , Lilian Weng , Minwoo Kim , Hyondong Oh

Balancing exploration and exploitation remains a key challenge in reinforcement learning (RL). State-of-the-art RL algorithms suffer from high sample complexity, particularly in the sparse reward case, where they can do no better than to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-22 Philippe Morere , Gilad Francis , Tom Blau , Fabio Ramos

Automated decision-making under uncertainty requires balancing exploitation and exploration. Classical methods treat these separately using heuristics, while Active Inference unifies them through Expected Free Energy (EFE) minimization.…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-11-25 Wouter W. L. Nuijten , Mykola Lukashchuk

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Feedback (RLVF) has become a key technique for enhancing the reasoning abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, its reliance on sparse, outcome based rewards, which only indicate if a final…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-09-03 Ang Li , Zhihang Yuan , Yang Zhang , Shouda Liu , Yisen Wang

Model-based deep reinforcement learning has achieved success in various domains that require high sample efficiencies, such as Go and robotics. However, there are some remaining issues, such as planning efficient explorations to learn more…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-06 Yao Yao , Li Xiao , Zhicheng An , Wanpeng Zhang , Dijun Luo

An inherent problem of reinforcement learning is performing exploration of an environment through random actions, of which a large portion can be unproductive. Instead, exploration can be improved by initializing the learning policy with an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-22 Jun Jet Tai , Jordan K. Terry , Mauro S. Innocente , James Brusey , Nadjim Horri