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Related papers: Safe Exploration in Reinforcement Learning: A Gene…

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We introduce Random Latent Exploration (RLE), a simple yet effective exploration strategy in reinforcement learning (RL). On average, RLE outperforms noise-based methods, which perturb the agent's actions, and bonus-based exploration, which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-28 Srinath Mahankali , Zhang-Wei Hong , Ayush Sekhari , Alexander Rakhlin , Pulkit Agrawal

Safety is one of the biggest concerns to applying reinforcement learning (RL) to the physical world. In its core part, it is challenging to ensure RL agents persistently satisfy a hard state constraint without white-box or black-box…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-10-19 Weiye Zhao , Tairan He , Changliu Liu

Safety is one of the main challenges in applying reinforcement learning to realistic environmental tasks. To ensure safety during and after training process, existing methods tend to adopt overly conservative policy to avoid unsafe…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-27 Xiao Zhang , Hai Zhang , Hongtu Zhou , Chang Huang , Di Zhang , Chen Ye , Junqiao Zhao

Reward maximization, safe exploration, and intrinsic motivation are often studied as separate objectives in reinforcement learning (RL). We present a unified geometric framework, that views these goals as instances of a single optimization…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-03 Nikola Milosevic , Nico Scherf

Ensuring safety in Reinforcement Learning (RL), typically framed as a Constrained Markov Decision Process (CMDP), is crucial for real-world exploration applications. Current approaches in handling CMDP struggle to balance optimality and…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-03-07 Zhaorun Chen , Zhuokai Zhao , Tairan He , Binhao Chen , Xuhao Zhao , Liang Gong , Chengliang Liu

Exploration is a fundamental challenge in reinforcement learning (RL). Many of the current exploration methods for deep RL use task-agnostic objectives, such as information gain or bonuses based on state visitation. However, many practical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-02-21 Abhishek Gupta , Russell Mendonca , YuXuan Liu , Pieter Abbeel , Sergey Levine

We consider the problem of reinforcement learning under safety requirements, in which an agent is trained to complete a given task, typically formalized as the maximization of a reward signal over time, while concurrently avoiding…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-09-25 Tu-Hoa Pham , Giovanni De Magistris , Don Joven Agravante , Subhajit Chaudhury , Asim Munawar , Ryuki Tachibana

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

We generalize the Safe Extremum Seeking algorithm to address the minimization of an unknown objective function subject to multiple unknown inequality and equality constraints, relying on recent results of gradient flow systems. These…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-10-09 Alan Williams , Jorge Cortés , Alexander Scheinker

In environments with uncertain dynamics exploration is necessary to learn how to perform well. Existing reinforcement learning algorithms provide strong exploration guarantees, but they tend to rely on an ergodicity assumption. The essence…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-07-10 Teodor Mihai Moldovan , Pieter Abbeel

Exploration in reinforcement learning (RL) remains an open challenge. RL algorithms rely on observing rewards to train the agent, and if informative rewards are sparse the agent learns slowly or may not learn at all. To improve exploration…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-12 Simone Parisi , Alireza Kazemipour , Michael Bowling

Safety has been a major concern when deploying deep reinforcement learning algorithms in the real world. A promising direction that ensures that the learned policy does not visit unsafe regions is to learn a \emph{barrier function} along…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-05-22 Rupak Majumdar , Nikhil Singh , Sadegh Soudjani

Deep reinforcement learning has enabled human-level or even super-human performance in various types of games. However, the amount of exploration required for learning is often quite large. Deep reinforcement learning also has super-human…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-14 Akane Minami , Yu Kono , Tatsuji Takahashi

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

Balancing exploration and exploitation remains a key challenge in reinforcement learning (RL). State-of-the-art RL algorithms suffer from high sample complexity, particularly in the sparse reward case, where they can do no better than to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-22 Philippe Morere , Gilad Francis , Tom Blau , Fabio Ramos

An inherent problem of reinforcement learning is performing exploration of an environment through random actions, of which a large portion can be unproductive. Instead, exploration can be improved by initializing the learning policy with an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-22 Jun Jet Tai , Jordan K. Terry , Mauro S. Innocente , James Brusey , Nadjim Horri

In contrast to the standard learning paradigm where all classes can be observed in training data, learning with augmented classes (LAC) tackles the problem where augmented classes unobserved in the training data may emerge in the test…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-13 Senlin Shu , Shuo He , Haobo Wang , Hongxin Wei , Tao Xiang , Lei Feng

Exploration-exploitation of functions, that is learning and optimizing a mapping between inputs and expected outputs, is ubiquitous to many real world situations. These situations sometimes require us to avoid certain outcomes at all cost,…

Applications · Statistics 2016-05-17 Eric Schulz , Quentin J. M. Huys , Dominik R. Bach , Maarten Speekenbrink , Andreas Krause

Numerous heuristics and advanced approaches have been proposed for exploration in different settings for deep reinforcement learning. Noise-based exploration generally fares well with dense-shaped rewards and bonus-based exploration with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-22 Sebastian Griesbach , Carlo D'Eramo

In Interactive Machine Learning (IML), we iteratively make decisions and obtain noisy observations of an unknown function. While IML methods, e.g., Bayesian optimization and active learning, have been successful in applications, on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-31 Matteo Turchetta , Felix Berkenkamp , Andreas Krause