Related papers: ELDEN: Exploration via Local Dependencies
Reinforcement-learning agents seek to maximize a reward signal through environmental interactions. As humans, our job in the learning process is to design reward functions to express desired behavior and enable the agent to learn such…
Latent learning, classically theorized by Tolman, shows that biological agents (e.g., rats) can acquire internal representations of their environment without rewards, enabling rapid adaptation once rewards are introduced. In contrast, from…
Extrinsic rewards can effectively guide reinforcement learning (RL) agents in specific tasks. However, extrinsic rewards frequently fall short in complex environments due to the significant human effort needed for their design and…
We address the problem of reinforcement learning in which observations may exhibit an arbitrary form of stochastic dependence on past observations and actions, i.e. environments more general than (PO)MDPs. The task for an agent is to attain…
It is common to implicitly assume access to intelligently captured inputs (e.g., photos from a human photographer), yet autonomously capturing good observations is itself a major challenge. We address the problem of learning to look around:…
Effective exploration is critical for reinforcement learning agents in environments with sparse rewards or high-dimensional state-action spaces. Recent works based on state-visitation counts, curiosity and entropy-maximization generate…
Recent advancements in deep reinforcement learning (RL) have demonstrated notable progress in sample efficiency, spanning both model-based and model-free paradigms. Despite the identification and mitigation of specific bottlenecks in prior…
Exploration in decentralized cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning faces two challenges. One is that the novelty of global states is unavailable, while the novelty of local observations is biased. The other is how agents can…
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…
Realistic environments often provide agents with very limited feedback. When the environment is initially unknown, the feedback, in the beginning, can be completely absent, and the agents may first choose to devote all their effort on…
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…
Recent research on structured exploration placed emphasis on identifying novel states in the state space and incentivizing the agent to revisit them through intrinsic reward bonuses. In this study, we question whether the performance boost…
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…
Exploration is essential in reinforcement learning, particularly in environments where external rewards are sparse. Here we focus on exploration with intrinsic rewards, where the agent transiently augments the external rewards with…
Reward functions are central in specifying the task we want a reinforcement learning agent to perform. Given a task and desired optimal behavior, we study the problem of designing informative reward functions so that the designed rewards…
The central tenet of reinforcement learning (RL) is that agents seek to maximize the sum of cumulative rewards. In contrast, active inference, an emerging framework within cognitive and computational neuroscience, proposes that agents act…
This paper presents a novel form of policy gradient for model-free reinforcement learning (RL) with improved exploration properties. Current policy-based methods use entropy regularization to encourage undirected exploration of the reward…
For most reinforcement learning approaches, the learning is performed by maximizing an accumulative reward that is expectedly and manually defined for specific tasks. However, in real world, rewards are emergent phenomena from the complex…
We seek to align agent policy with human expert behavior in a reinforcement learning (RL) setting, without any prior knowledge about dynamics, reward function, and unsafe states. There is a human expert knowing the rewards and unsafe states…
This paper considers the problem of efficient exploration of unseen environments, a key challenge in AI. We propose a `learning to explore' framework where we learn a policy from a distribution of environments. At test time, presented with…