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Related papers: Exploration via Epistemic Value Estimation

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Integrating model-free and model-based approaches in reinforcement learning has the potential to achieve the high performance of model-free algorithms with low sample complexity. However, this is difficult because an imperfect dynamics…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-10 Jacob Buckman , Danijar Hafner , George Tucker , Eugene Brevdo , Honglak Lee

Quantifying uncertainty about a policy's long-term performance is important to solve sequential decision-making tasks. We study the problem from a model-based Bayesian reinforcement learning perspective, where the goal is to learn the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-04 Carlos E. Luis , Alessandro G. Bottero , Julia Vinogradska , Felix Berkenkamp , Jan Peters

Optimism about the poorly understood states and actions is the main driving force of exploration for many provably-efficient reinforcement learning algorithms. We propose optimism in the face of sensible value functions (OFVF)- a novel…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-04-19 Reazul H. Russel , Tianyi Gu , Marek Petrik

With reinforcement learning, an agent could learn complex behaviors from high-level abstractions of the task. However, exploration and reward shaping remained challenging for existing methods, especially in scenarios where the extrinsic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-11 Jie Chen , Wenjun Xu

A recently popular approach to solving reinforcement learning is with data from human preferences. In fact, human preference data are now used with classic reinforcement learning algorithms such as actor-critic methods, which involve…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-28 Zihao Li , Xiang Ji , Minshuo Chen , Mengdi Wang

The novel unseen classes can be formulated as the extreme values of known classes. This inspired the recent works on open-set recognition \cite{Scheirer_2013_TPAMI,Scheirer_2014_TPAMIb,EVM}, which however can have no way of naming the novel…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2018-01-30 Yanwei Fu , HanZe Dong , Yu-feng Ma , Zhengjun Zhang , Xiangyang Xue

Causal inference is central to scientific discovery, yet choosing appropriate methods remains challenging because of the complexity of both statistical methodology and real-world data. Inspired by the success of artificial intelligence in…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-07 Can Wang , Hongyu Zhao , Yiqun Chen

This work introduces an efficient novel approach for epistemic uncertainty estimation for ensemble models for regression tasks using pairwise-distance estimators (PaiDEs). Utilizing the pairwise-distance between model components, these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-29 Lucas Berry , David Meger

Exploration bonuses in reinforcement learning guide long-horizon exploration by defining custom intrinsic objectives. Several exploration objectives like count-based bonuses, pseudo-counts, and state-entropy maximization are non-stationary…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-24 Roger Creus Castanyer , Joshua Romoff , Glen Berseth

Active inference (AIF) unifies exploration and exploitation by minimizing the Expected Free Energy (EFE), balancing epistemic value (information gain) and pragmatic value (task performance) through a curiosity coefficient. Yet it has been…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-06 Yingke Li , Anjali Parashar , Enlu Zhou , Chuchu Fan

Efficient exploration is a long-standing problem in sensorimotor learning. Major advances have been demonstrated in noise-free, non-stochastic domains such as video games and simulation. However, most of these formulations either get stuck…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-11 Deepak Pathak , Dhiraj Gandhi , Abhinav Gupta

There has been growing progress on theoretical analyses for provably efficient learning in MDPs with linear function approximation, but much of the existing work has made strong assumptions to enable exploration by conventional exploration…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-23 Andrea Zanette , Alessandro Lazaric , Mykel J. Kochenderfer , Emma Brunskill

Solving real-life sequential decision making problems under partial observability involves an exploration-exploitation problem. To be successful, an agent needs to efficiently gather valuable information about the state of the world for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-03 Haiyan Yin , Yingzhen Li , Sinno Jialin Pan , Cheng Zhang , Sebastian Tschiatschek

Reinforcement Learning is a powerful tool to model decision-making processes. However, it relies on an exploration-exploitation trade-off that remains an open challenge for many tasks. In this work, we study neighboring state-based,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-04 Yu-Teng Li , Justin Lin , Jeffery Cheng , Pedro Pachuca

Intelligent exploration remains a critical challenge in reinforcement learning (RL), especially in visual control tasks. Unlike low-dimensional state-based RL, visual RL must extract task-relevant structure from raw pixels, making…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Le Mao , Andrew H. Liu , Renos Zabounidis , Yanan Niu , Zachary Kingston , Joseph Campbell

Exploration is a difficult challenge in reinforcement learning and even recent state-of-the art curiosity-based methods rely on the simple epsilon-greedy strategy to generate novelty. We argue that pure random walks do not succeed to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-07-06 Fabio Pardo , Vitaly Levdik , Petar Kormushev

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR), which typically adopts Pass@1 as the reward, has faced the issues in balancing exploration and exploitation, causing policies to prefer conservative actions, converging to a local…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-15 Zhipeng Chen , Xiaobo Qin , Youbin Wu , Yue Ling , Qinghao Ye , Wayne Xin Zhao , Guang Shi

Directed Exploration is a crucial challenge in reinforcement learning (RL), especially when rewards are sparse. Information-directed sampling (IDS), which optimizes the information ratio, seeks to do so by augmenting regret with information…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-20 Souradip Chakraborty , Amrit Singh Bedi , Alec Koppel , Mengdi Wang , Furong Huang , Dinesh Manocha

Effective exploration in reinforcement learning requires not only tracking where an agent has been, but also understanding how the agent perceives and represents the world. To learn powerful representations, an agent should actively explore…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Faisal Mohamed , Catherine Ji , Benjamin Eysenbach , Glen Berseth

Meta-Reinforcement learning approaches aim to develop learning procedures that can adapt quickly to a distribution of tasks with the help of a few examples. Developing efficient exploration strategies capable of finding the most useful…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-12 Swaminathan Gurumurthy , Sumit Kumar , Katia Sycara