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Related papers: Exploration via Epistemic Value Estimation

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Exploration remains a key challenge in deep reinforcement learning (RL). Optimism in the face of uncertainty is a well-known heuristic with theoretical guarantees in the tabular setting, but how best to translate the principle to deep…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-06 Brendan O'Donoghue

Exploration is widely regarded as one of the most challenging aspects of reinforcement learning (RL), with many naive approaches succumbing to exponential sample complexity. To isolate the challenges of exploration, we propose a new…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-10 Chi Jin , Akshay Krishnamurthy , Max Simchowitz , Tiancheng Yu

Despite the close connection between exploration and sample efficiency, most state of the art reinforcement learning algorithms include no considerations for exploration beyond maximizing the entropy of the policy. In this work we address…

Exploration-Exploitation (E{\&}E) algorithms are commonly adopted to deal with the feedback-loop issue in large-scale online recommender systems. Most of existing studies believe that high uncertainty can be a good indicator of potential…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2022-05-31 Kailun Wu , Zhangming Chan , Weijie Bian , Lejian Ren , Shiming Xiang , Shuguang Han , Hongbo Deng , Bo Zheng

Balancing exploration and exploitation is a fundamental part of reinforcement learning, yet most state-of-the-art algorithms use a naive exploration protocol like $\epsilon$-greedy. This contributes to the problem of high sample complexity,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-21 Tom Blau , Lionel Ott , Fabio Ramos

A promising technique for exploration is to maximize the entropy of visited state distribution, i.e., state entropy, by encouraging uniform coverage of visited state space. While it has been effective for an unsupervised setup, it tends to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-12 Dongyoung Kim , Jinwoo Shin , Pieter Abbeel , Younggyo Seo

We study algorithms for average-cost reinforcement learning problems with value function approximation. Our starting point is the recently proposed POLITEX algorithm, a version of policy iteration where the policy produced in each iteration…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-08-29 Yasin Abbasi-Yadkori , Nevena Lazic , Csaba Szepesvari , Gellert Weisz

Efficiently identifying the right trajectories for training remains an open problem in GFlowNets. To address this, it is essential to prioritize exploration in regions of the state space where the reward distribution has not been…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-23 Sajan Muhammad , Salem Lahlou

Reinforcement learning is commonly applied in residential energy management, particularly for optimizing energy costs. However, RL agents often face challenges when dealing with deceptive and sparse rewards in the energy control domain,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-01-17 Junlin Lu , Patrick Mannion , Karl Mason

We propose a reinforcement learning framework for discrete environments in which an agent makes both strategic and tactical decisions. The former manifests itself through the use of value function, while the latter is powered by a tree…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-05 Piotr Miłoś , Łukasz Kuciński , Konrad Czechowski , Piotr Kozakowski , Maciek Klimek

Exploration is a crucial and distinctive aspect of reinforcement learning (RL) that remains a fundamental open problem. Several methods have been proposed to tackle this challenge. Commonly used methods inject random noise directly into the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-06 Sebastian Griesbach , Carlo D'Eramo

An ideal embodied agent should possess lifelong learning capabilities to handle long-horizon and complex tasks, enabling continuous operation in general environments. This not only requires the agent to accurately accomplish given tasks but…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Sen Wang , Bangwei Liu , Zhenkun Gao , Lizhuang Ma , Xuhong Wang , Yuan Xie , Xin Tan

Exploration in environments with continuous control and sparse rewards remains a key challenge in reinforcement learning (RL). Recently, surprise has been used as an intrinsic reward that encourages systematic and efficient exploration. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-01 Haitao Xu , Brendan McCane , Lech Szymanski

The exploration-exploitation dilemma has been an intriguing and unsolved problem within the framework of reinforcement learning. "Optimism in the face of uncertainty" and model building play central roles in advanced exploration methods.…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2008-10-21 István Szita , András Lőrincz

Efficient exploration is necessary to achieve good sample efficiency for reinforcement learning in general. From small, tabular settings such as gridworlds to large, continuous and sparse reward settings such as robotic object manipulation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-20 Zhaohan Daniel Guo , Emma Brunskill

Using a model of the environment and a value function, an agent can construct many estimates of a state's value, by unrolling the model for different lengths and bootstrapping with its value function. Our key insight is that one can treat…

Reinforcement learning with verifiable reward (RLVR) has become a promising paradigm for post-training large language models (LLMs) to improve their reasoning capability. However, when the rollout accuracy is low on hard problems, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Huanyu Liu , Jia Li , Yihong Dong , Chang Yu , Taozhi Chen , Lecheng Wang , Yongding Tao , Bin Gu , Ge Li

We address the problem of planning under uncertainty, where an agent must choose actions that not only achieve desired outcomes but also reduce uncertainty. Traditional methods often treat exploration and exploitation as separate…

Acquiring abilities in the absence of a task-oriented reward function is at the frontier of reinforcement learning research. This problem has been studied through the lens of empowerment, which draws a connection between option discovery…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-04 Víctor Campos , Alexander Trott , Caiming Xiong , Richard Socher , Xavier Giro-i-Nieto , Jordi Torres

A reinforcement learning agent tries to maximize its cumulative payoff by interacting in an unknown environment. It is important for the agent to explore suboptimal actions as well as to pick actions with highest known rewards. Yet, in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-01-23 Reazul Hasan Russel