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Related papers: Careful at Estimation and Bold at Exploration

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Proximal policy optimization (PPO) algorithm is a deep reinforcement learning algorithm with outstanding performance, especially in continuous control tasks. But the performance of this method is still affected by its exploration ability.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-12 Junwei Zhang , Zhenghao Zhang , Shuai Han , Shuai Lü

We introduce Random Reward Perturbation (RRP), a novel exploration strategy for reinforcement learning (RL). Our theoretical analyses demonstrate that adding zero-mean noise to environmental rewards effectively enhances policy diversity…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-11 Haozhe Ma , Guoji Fu , Zhengding Luo , Jiele Wu , Tze-Yun Leong

Exploration policies in Bayesian bandits maximize the average reward over problem instances drawn from some distribution $\mathcal{P}$. In this work, we learn such policies for an unknown distribution $\mathcal{P}$ using samples from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-11 Craig Boutilier , Chih-Wei Hsu , Branislav Kveton , Martin Mladenov , Csaba Szepesvari , Manzil Zaheer

A key challenge to deploying reinforcement learning in practice is avoiding excessive (harmful) exploration in individual episodes. We propose a natural constraint on exploration -- \textit{uniformly} outperforming a conservative policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-27 Wanqiao Xu , Jason Yecheng Ma , Kan Xu , Hamsa Bastani , Osbert Bastani

Reinforcement learning (RL) post-training is crucial for LLM alignment and reasoning, but existing policy-based methods, such as PPO and DPO, can fall short of fixing shortcuts inherited from pre-training. In this work, we introduce…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Jin Peng Zhou , Kaiwen Wang , Jonathan Chang , Zhaolin Gao , Nathan Kallus , Kilian Q. Weinberger , Kianté Brantley , Wen Sun

Multi-agent reinforcement learning in dynamic social dilemmas commonly relies on parameter sharing to enable scalability. We show that in shared-policy Deep Q-Network learning, standard exploration can induce a robust and systematic…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2026-01-12 Yi-Ning Weng , Hsuan-Wei Lee

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

As a data-driven approach, offline MARL learns superior policies solely from offline datasets, ideal for domains rich in historical data but with high interaction costs and risks. However, most existing methods are task-specific, requiring…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-29 Xun Wang , Zhuoran Li , Hai Zhong , Longbo Huang

This work aims to tackle a major challenge in offline Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL), namely the reward extrapolation error, where the learned reward function may fail to explain the task correctly and misguide the agent in unseen…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-22 Sheng Yue , Guanbo Wang , Wei Shao , Zhaofeng Zhang , Sen Lin , Ju Ren , Junshan Zhang

Recent studies have shown that deep reinforcement learning (DRL) policies are vulnerable to adversarial attacks, which raise concerns about applications of DRL to safety-critical systems. In this work, we adopt a principled way and study…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-17 Chao Wang

Meta reinforcement learning (meta-RL) extracts knowledge from previous tasks and achieves fast adaptation to new tasks. Despite recent progress, efficient exploration in meta-RL remains a key challenge in sparse-reward tasks, as it requires…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-11-15 Jin Zhang , Jianhao Wang , Hao Hu , Tong Chen , Yingfeng Chen , Changjie Fan , Chongjie Zhang

Reinforcement learning (RL) enables an agent to learn from trial-and-error experiences toward achieving long-term goals; automated planning aims to compute plans for accomplishing tasks using action knowledge. Despite their shared goal of…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-03-17 Yohei Hayamizu , Saeid Amiri , Kishan Chandan , Keiki Takadama , Shiqi Zhang

Offline inverse reinforcement learning (Offline IRL) aims to recover the structure of rewards and environment dynamics that underlie observed actions in a fixed, finite set of demonstrations from an expert agent. Accurate models of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-01 Siliang Zeng , Chenliang Li , Alfredo Garcia , Mingyi Hong

One of the bottlenecks preventing Deep Reinforcement Learning algorithms (DRL) from real-world applications is how to explore the environment and collect informative transitions efficiently. The present paper describes bounded exploration,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-10 Ting Qiao , Henry Williams , David Valencia , Bruce MacDonald

We study quantile-optimal policy learning where the goal is to find a policy whose reward distribution has the largest $\alpha$-quantile for some $\alpha \in (0, 1)$. We focus on the offline setting whose generating process involves…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-06-10 Zhongren Chen , Siyu Chen , Zhengling Qi , Xiaohong Chen , Zhuoran Yang

In many sequential decision-making problems, the goal is to optimize a utility function while satisfying a set of constraints on different utilities. This learning problem is formalized through Constrained Markov Decision Processes (CMDPs).…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-05 Yonathan Efroni , Shie Mannor , Matteo Pirotta

Offline reinforcement learning, wherein one uses off-policy data logged by a fixed behavior policy to evaluate and learn new policies, is crucial in applications where experimentation is limited such as medicine. We study the estimation of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-09 Nathan Kallus , Masatoshi Uehara

We investigate statistical uncertainty quantification for reinforcement learning (RL) and its implications in exploration policy. Despite ever-growing literature on RL applications, fundamental questions about inference and error…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-06 YI Zhu , Jing Dong , Henry Lam

Tackling multi-agent learning problems efficiently is a challenging task in continuous action domains. While value-based algorithms excel in sample efficiency when applied to discrete action domains, they are usually inefficient when…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2024-02-13 Yasin Findik , S. Reza Ahmadzadeh

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has been able to solve hard problems such as playing Atari games or solving the game of Go, with a unified approach. Yet modern deep RL approaches are still not widely used in real-world applications. One reason…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-08 Achraf Azize , Othman Gaizi