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Related papers: On the Importance of Exploration for Generalizatio…

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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

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

How to efficiently explore in reinforcement learning is an open problem. Many exploration algorithms employ the epistemic uncertainty of their own value predictions -- for instance to compute an exploration bonus or upper confidence bound.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-08 Simon Schmitt , John Shawe-Taylor , Hado van Hasselt

Two hitherto disconnected threads of research, diverse exploration (DE) and maximum entropy RL have addressed a wide range of problems facing reinforcement learning algorithms via ostensibly distinct mechanisms. In this work, we identify a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-05 Andrew Cohen , Lei Yu , Xingye Qiao , Xiangrong Tong

The infamous exploration-exploitation dilemma is one of the oldest and most important problems in reinforcement learning (RL). Deliberate and effective exploration is necessary for RL agents to succeed in most environments. However, until…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-10-09 Suraj Narayanan Sasikumar

Collaborative multi-agent exploration of unknown environments is crucial for search and rescue operations. Effective real-world deployment must address challenges such as limited inter-agent communication and static and dynamic obstacles.…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-12-31 Gabriele Calzolari , Vidya Sumathy , Christoforos Kanellakis , George Nikolakopoulos

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) promises to expand the capabilities of language models, but it is unclear if current RL techniques promote the discovery of novel behaviors, or simply sharpen those already present in the base model. In this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Jens Tuyls , Dylan J. Foster , Akshay Krishnamurthy , Jordan T. Ash

Navigating and understanding complex and unknown environments autonomously demands more than just basic perception and movement from embodied agents. Truly effective exploration requires agents to possess higher-level cognitive abilities,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-09-12 Abdel Hakim Drid , Vincenzo Suriani , Daniele Nardi , Abderrezzak Debilou

The explore{exploit dilemma is one of the central challenges in Reinforcement Learning (RL). Bayesian RL solves the dilemma by providing the agent with information in the form of a prior distribution over environments; however, full…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-03-19 Jonathan Sorg , Satinder Singh , Richard L. Lewis

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

Task automation of surgical robot has the potentials to improve surgical efficiency. Recent reinforcement learning (RL) based approaches provide scalable solutions to surgical automation, but typically require extensive data collection to…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-02-21 Tao Huang , Kai Chen , Bin Li , Yun-Hui Liu , Qi Dou

Recent works have proven that intricate cooperative behaviors can emerge in agents trained using meta reinforcement learning on open ended task distributions using self-play. While the results are impressive, we argue that self-play and…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2024-05-08 Richard Bornemann , Gautier Hamon , Eleni Nisioti , Clément Moulin-Frier

Exploration is a crucial skill for in-context reinforcement learning in unknown environments. However, it remains unclear if large language models can effectively explore a partially hidden state space. This work isolates exploration as the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-26 Tim Grams , Patrick Betz , Sascha Marton , Stefan Lüdtke , Christian Bartelt

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 study an important yet under-addressed problem of quickly and safely improving policies in online reinforcement learning domains. As its solution, we propose a novel exploration strategy - diverse exploration (DE), which learns and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-02-26 Andrew Cohen , Lei Yu , Robert Wright

How do you incentivize self-interested agents to $\textit{explore}$ when they prefer to $\textit{exploit}$? We consider complex exploration problems, where each agent faces the same (but unknown) MDP. In contrast with traditional…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-21 Max Simchowitz , Aleksandrs Slivkins

Building generally capable agents is a grand challenge for deep reinforcement learning (RL). To approach this challenge practically, we outline two key desiderata: 1) to facilitate generalization, exploration should be task agnostic; 2) to…

Learning effective representations in image-based environments is crucial for sample efficient Reinforcement Learning (RL). Unfortunately, in RL, representation learning is confounded with the exploratory experience of the agent -- learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-21 Denis Yarats , Rob Fergus , Alessandro Lazaric , Lerrel Pinto

Exploration algorithms for reinforcement learning typically replace or augment the reward function with an additional ``intrinsic'' reward that trains the agent to seek previously unseen states of the environment. Here, we consider an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Kevin McKee , Eric Alt , Andrew Grebenisan , Mick van Gelderen , Gary Miguel