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Related papers: Exploration via Epistemic Value Estimation

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We study the challenging exploration incentive problem in both bandit and reinforcement learning, where the rewards are scale-free and potentially unbounded, driven by real-world scenarios and differing from existing work. Past works in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-07 Mengfan Xu , Diego Klabjan

Model-based reinforcement learning is a powerful tool, but collecting data to fit an accurate model of the system can be costly. Exploring an unknown environment in a sample-efficient manner is hence of great importance. However, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-27 Matthieu Blanke , Marc Lelarge

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) is a powerful paradigm for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs), yet its success hinges on effective exploration. An ideal exploration strategy must…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-08 Chenghao Yang , Lin Gui , Chenxiao Yang , Victor Veitch , Lizhu Zhang , Zhuokai Zhao

Autonomous 3D environment exploration is a fundamental task for various applications such as navigation. The goal of exploration is to investigate a new environment and build its occupancy map efficiently. In this paper, we propose a new…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-11-03 Liu Juncheng , McCane Brendan , Mills Steven

The interplay between exploration and exploitation in competitive multi-agent learning is still far from being well understood. Motivated by this, we study smooth Q-learning, a prototypical learning model that explicitly captures the…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2021-06-25 Stefanos Leonardos , Georgios Piliouras , Kelly Spendlove

Efficient exploration is critical in cooperative deep Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL). In this work, we propose an exploration method that effectively encourages cooperative exploration based on the idea of sequential…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-17 Xutong Zhao , Yangchen Pan , Chenjun Xiao , Sarath Chandar , Janarthanan Rajendran

Planning and Learning are complementary approaches. Planning relies on deliberative reasoning about the current state and sequence of future reachable states to solve the problem. Learning, on the other hand, is focused on improving system…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-09-11 Zlatan Ajanovic , Halil Beglerovic , Bakir Lacevic

Reinforcement learning (RL) has improved the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs), yet state-of-the-art methods still fail to learn on many training problems. On hard problems, on-policy RL rarely explores even a single…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-27 Yuxiao Qu , Amrith Setlur , Virginia Smith , Ruslan Salakhutdinov , Aviral Kumar

The exploration \& exploitation dilemma poses significant challenges in reinforcement learning (RL). Recently, curiosity-based exploration methods achieved great success in tackling hard-exploration problems. However, they necessitate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-06 Yiran Wang , Chenshu Liu , Yunfan Li , Sanae Amani , Bolei Zhou , Lin F. Yang

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a powerful framework for decision-making in uncertain environments, but it often requires large amounts of data to learn an optimal policy. We address this challenge by incorporating prior model knowledge to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-29 J. S. van Hulst , W. P. M. H. Heemels , D. J. Antunes

Reinforcement Learning (RL) heavily relies on the careful design of the reward function. However, accurately assigning rewards to each state-action pair in Long-Term Reinforcement Learning (LTRL) tasks remains a significant challenge. As a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Qi Ju , Falin Hei , Zhemei Fang , Yunfeng Luo

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) for Large Reasoning Models hinges on baseline estimation for variance reduction, but existing approaches pay a heavy price: PPO requires a policy-model scale critic, while GRPO needs…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Yunho Choi , Jongwon Lim , Woojin Ahn , Minjae Oh , Jeonghoon Shim , Yohan Jo

Reinforcement learning algorithms typically struggle in the absence of a dense, well-shaped reward function. Intrinsically motivated exploration methods address this limitation by rewarding agents for visiting novel states or transitions,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-18 Yuqing Du , Olivia Watkins , Zihan Wang , Cédric Colas , Trevor Darrell , Pieter Abbeel , Abhishek Gupta , Jacob Andreas

State-of-the-art reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms typically use random sampling (e.g., $\epsilon$-greedy) for exploration, but this method fails on hard exploration tasks like Montezuma's Revenge. To address the challenge of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-21 Eric Chen , Zhang-Wei Hong , Joni Pajarinen , Pulkit Agrawal

Traditional information theory provides a valuable foundation for Reinforcement Learning, particularly through representation learning and entropy maximization for agent exploration. However, existing methods primarily concentrate on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-10 Xianghua Zeng , Hao Peng , Angsheng Li

Dynamic environments require adaptive applications. One particular machine learning problem in dynamic environments is open world recognition. It characterizes a continuously changing domain where only some classes are seen in one batch of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-31 Tobias Koch , Felix Liebezeit , Christian Riess , Vincent Christlein , Thomas Köhler

What is a good exploration strategy for an agent that interacts with an environment in the absence of external rewards? Ideally, we would like to get a policy driving towards a uniform state-action visitation (highly exploring) in a minimum…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-20 Mirco Mutti , Marcello Restelli

Foundation models have become a dominant paradigm in machine learning, achieving remarkable performance across diverse tasks through large-scale pretraining. However, these models often yield overconfident, uncalibrated predictions. The…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-30 Mehmet Ozgur Turkoglu , Dominik J. Mühlematter , Alexander Becker , Konrad Schindler , Helge Aasen

With the continuous advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs), intelligent agents are becoming increasingly vital. However, these agents often fail in environments governed by implicit rules--hidden constraints that cannot be observed…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Wentong Chen , Xin Cong , Zhong Zhang , Yaxi Lu , Siyuan Zhao , Yesai Wu , Qinyu Luo , Haotian Chen , Yankai Lin , Zhiyuan Liu , Maosong Sun

Although exploration in reinforcement learning is well understood from a theoretical point of view, provably correct methods remain impractical. In this paper we study the interplay between exploration and approximation, what we call…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-01-25 Adrien Ali Taïga , Aaron Courville , Marc G. Bellemare