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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

We present a new model-based algorithm for reinforcement learning (RL) which consists of explicit exploration and exploitation phases, and is applicable in large or infinite state spaces. The algorithm maintains a set of dynamics models…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-03 Mikael Henaff

To achieve sample efficiency in reinforcement learning (RL), it necessitates efficiently exploring the underlying environment. Under the offline setting, addressing the exploration challenge lies in collecting an offline dataset with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-15 Shuang Qiu , Jieping Ye , Zhaoran Wang , Zhuoran Yang

One of the challenges in online reinforcement learning (RL) is that the agent needs to trade off the exploration of the environment and the exploitation of the samples to optimize its behavior. Whether we optimize for regret, sample…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-19 Jean Tarbouriech , Matteo Pirotta , Michal Valko , Alessandro Lazaric

Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms aim to balance exploiting the current best strategy with exploring new options that could lead to higher rewards. Most common RL algorithms use undirected exploration, i.e., select random sequences of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-01 Bhavya Sukhija , Stelian Coros , Andreas Krause , Pieter Abbeel , Carmelo Sferrazza

In this paper, a unified framework for exploration in reinforcement learning (RL) is proposed based on an option-critic model. The proposed framework learns to integrate a set of diverse exploration strategies so that the agent can…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-10 Woojun Kim , Jeonghye Kim , Youngchul Sung

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

The goal of meta-reinforcement learning (meta-RL) is to build agents that can quickly learn new tasks by leveraging prior experience on related tasks. Learning a new task often requires both exploring to gather task-relevant information and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-15 Evan Zheran Liu , Aditi Raghunathan , Percy Liang , Chelsea Finn

Efficient exploration is one of the main challenges in reinforcement learning (RL). Most existing sample-efficient algorithms assume the existence of a single reward function during exploration. In many practical scenarios, however, there…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-18 Xuezhou Zhang , Yuzhe ma , Adish Singla

The exploration-exploitation dilemma in reinforcement learning (RL) is a fundamental challenge to efficient RL algorithms. Existing algorithms for finite state and action discounted RL problems address this by assuming sufficient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-09 Caleb Ju , Guanghui Lan

Many potential applications of reinforcement learning (RL) are stymied by the large numbers of samples required to learn an effective policy. This is especially true when applying RL to real-world control tasks, e.g. in the sciences or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-11 Viraj Mehta , Ian Char , Joseph Abbate , Rory Conlin , Mark D. Boyer , Stefano Ermon , Jeff Schneider , Willie Neiswanger

Exploration is a major challenge in reinforcement learning, especially for high-dimensional domains that require function approximation. We propose exploration objectives -- policy optimization objectives that enable downstream maximization…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-06 Philip Amortila , Dylan J. Foster , Akshay Krishnamurthy

In online reinforcement learning (RL), efficient exploration remains particularly challenging in high-dimensional environments with sparse rewards. In low-dimensional environments, where tabular parameterization is possible, count-based…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-21 Tianjun Zhang , Paria Rashidinejad , Jiantao Jiao , Yuandong Tian , Joseph Gonzalez , Stuart Russell

Incomplete knowledge of the environment leads an agent to make decisions under uncertainty. One of the major dilemmas in Reinforcement Learning (RL) where an autonomous agent has to balance two contrasting needs in making its decisions is:…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-02-21 Valentina Zangirolami , Matteo Borrotti

High sample complexity remains a barrier to the application of reinforcement learning (RL), particularly in multi-agent systems. A large body of work has demonstrated that exploration mechanisms based on the principle of optimism under…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-08-02 Robert Loftin , Aadirupa Saha , Sam Devlin , Katja Hofmann

Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents often struggle with inefficient exploration, particularly in environments with sparse rewards. Traditional exploration strategies can lead to slow learning and suboptimal performance because agents fail to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Gaurav Chaudhary , Laxmidhar Behera , Washim Uddin Mondal

Efficient reinforcement learning (RL) involves a trade-off between "exploitative" actions that maximise expected reward and "explorative'" ones that sample unvisited states. To encourage exploration, recent approaches proposed adding…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-01 Changmin Yu , David Mguni , Dong Li , Aivar Sootla , Jun Wang , Neil Burgess

Exploration is essential for reinforcement learning (RL). To face the challenges of exploration, we consider a reward-free RL framework that completely separates exploration from exploitation and brings new challenges for exploration…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-11 Chuheng Zhang , Yuanying Cai , Longbo Huang , Jian Li

The sim-to-real gap, where agents trained in a simulator face significant performance degradation during testing, is a fundamental challenge in reinforcement learning. Extansive works adopt the framework of distributionally robust RL, to…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-11-12 Zewu Zheng , Yuanyuan Lin

Offline-to-online reinforcement learning (RL) leverages both pre-trained offline policies and online policies trained for downstream tasks, aiming to improve data efficiency and accelerate performance enhancement. An existing approach,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-01 JaeYoon Kim , Junyu Xuan , Christy Liang , Farookh Hussain
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