Related papers: Scalable Online Exploration via Coverability
Exploration is fundamental to reinforcement learning (RL), as it determines how effectively an agent discovers and exploits the underlying structure of its environment to achieve optimal performance. Existing exploration methods generally…
Achieving efficient and scalable exploration in complex domains poses a major challenge in reinforcement learning. While Bayesian and PAC-MDP approaches to the exploration problem offer strong formal guarantees, they are often impractical…
We consider online learning problems under a partial observability model capturing situations where the information conveyed to the learner is between full information and bandit feedback. In the simplest variant, we assume that in addition…
Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has emerged as a scalable paradigm for improving the reasoning capabilities of large language models. However, its effectiveness is fundamentally limited by exploration: the policy can…
Balancing exploration and exploitation is a central goal in reinforcement learning (RL). Despite recent advances in enhancing large language model (LLM) reasoning, most methods lean toward exploitation, and increasingly encounter…
For many applications of reinforcement learning it can be more convenient to specify both a reward function and constraints, rather than trying to design behavior through the reward function. For example, systems that physically interact…
We study the reward-free reinforcement learning framework, which is particularly suitable for batch reinforcement learning and scenarios where one needs policies for multiple reward functions. This framework has two phases. In the…
Online learning to rank (OL2R) has attracted great research interests in recent years, thanks to its advantages in avoiding expensive relevance labeling as required in offline supervised ranking model learning. Such a solution explores the…
Offline reinforcement learning (RL) aims to optimize a policy using collected data without online interactions. Model-based approaches are particularly appealing for addressing offline RL challenges because of their capability to mitigate…
Intrinsic motivation enables reinforcement learning (RL) agents to explore when rewards are very sparse, where traditional exploration heuristics such as Boltzmann or e-greedy would typically fail. However, intrinsic exploration is…
We study the problem of learning exploration-exploitation strategies that effectively adapt to dynamic environments, where the task may change over time. While RNN-based policies could in principle represent such strategies, in practice…
We study reward-free reinforcement learning (RL) under general non-linear function approximation, and establish sample efficiency and hardness results under various standard structural assumptions. On the positive side, we propose the…
Decision-making under distribution shift is a central challenge in reinforcement learning (RL), where training and deployment environments differ. We study this problem through the lens of robust Markov decision processes (RMDPs), which…
Reward-free exploration is a reinforcement learning setting studied by Jin et al. (2020), who address it by running several algorithms with regret guarantees in parallel. In our work, we instead give a more natural adaptive approach for…
Balancing exploration and exploitation remains a central challenge in reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) for large language models (LLMs). Current RLVR methods often overemphasize exploitation, leading to entropy…
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…
The exploration-exploitation dilemma has been an intriguing and unsolved problem within the framework of reinforcement learning. "Optimism in the face of uncertainty" and model building play central roles in advanced exploration methods.…
We present a representation-driven framework for reinforcement learning. By representing policies as estimates of their expected values, we leverage techniques from contextual bandits to guide exploration and exploitation. Particularly,…
Exploration in unknown environments is a fundamental problem in reinforcement learning and control. In this work, we study task-guided exploration and determine what precisely an agent must learn about their environment in order to complete…
This paper concerns the central issues of model robustness and sample efficiency in offline reinforcement learning (RL), which aims to learn to perform decision making from history data without active exploration. Due to uncertainties and…