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Multi-agent reinforcement learning has shown promise in learning cooperative behaviors in team-based environments. However, such methods often demand extensive training time. For instance, the state-of-the-art method TiZero takes 40 days to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-18 Amir Baghi , Jens Sjölund , Joakim Bergdahl , Linus Gisslén , Alessandro Sestini

Off-policy learning allows us to learn about possible policies of behavior from experience generated by a different behavior policy. Temporal difference (TD) learning algorithms can become unstable when combined with function approximation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-23 Ray Jiang , Tom Zahavy , Zhongwen Xu , Adam White , Matteo Hessel , Charles Blundell , Hado van Hasselt

Reinforcement learning has empowered large language models to act as intelligent agents, yet training them for long-horizon tasks remains challenging due to the scarcity of high-quality trajectories, especially under limited resources.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-29 Jinyang Wu , Shuo Yang , Changpeng Yang , Yuhao Shen , Shuai Zhang , Zhengqi Wen , Jianhua Tao

Efficient exploration remains a challenging problem in reinforcement learning, especially for those tasks where rewards from environments are sparse. A commonly used approach for exploring such environments is to introduce some "intrinsic"…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-16 Neale Ratzlaff , Qinxun Bai , Li Fuxin , Wei Xu

Reinforcement learning (RL) with continuous time and state/action spaces is often data-intensive and brittle under nuisance variability and shift, motivating methods that exploit value-preserving structures to stabilize and improve…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Zuyuan Zhang , Fei Xu Yu , Tian Lan

Maintaining the long-term exploration capability of the agent remains one of the critical challenges in deep reinforcement learning. A representative solution is to leverage reward shaping to provide intrinsic rewards for the agent to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-21 Mingqi Yuan , Mon-on Pun , Dong Wang , Yi Chen , Haojun Li

The tradeoff between accuracy and speed is considered fundamental to individual and collective decision-making. In this paper, we focus on collective estimation as an example of collective decision-making. The task is to estimate the…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2022-01-19 Mohsen Raoufi , Heiko Hamann , Pawel Romanczuk

Exploration is an essential part of reinforcement learning, which restricts the quality of learned policy. Hard-exploration environments are defined by huge state space and sparse rewards. In such conditions, an exhaustive exploration of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-22 Leonid Ugadiarov , Alexey Skrynnik , Aleksandr I. Panov

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

This paper studies a discrete-time mean-variance model based on reinforcement learning. Compared with its continuous-time counterpart in \cite{zhou2020mv}, the discrete-time model makes more general assumptions about the asset's return…

Mathematical Finance · Quantitative Finance 2023-12-27 Xiangyu Cui , Xun Li , Yun Shi , Si Zhao

Efficient exploration is a long-standing problem in reinforcement learning since extrinsic rewards are usually sparse or missing. A popular solution to this issue is to feed an agent with novelty signals as intrinsic rewards. In this work,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-20 Jianren Wang , Ziwen Zhuang , Hang Zhao

Temporal-Difference (TD) learning is a general and very useful tool for estimating the value function of a given policy, which in turn is required to find good policies. Generally speaking, TD learning updates states whenever they are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-08-24 Nishanth Anand , Doina Precup

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

Very large state spaces with a sparse reward signal are difficult to explore. The lack of a sophisticated guidance results in a poor performance for numerous reinforcement learning algorithms. In these cases, the commonly used random…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-16 Marc Höftmann , Jan Robine , Stefan Harmeling

Exploring unknown environments efficiently is a fundamental challenge in unsupervised goal-conditioned reinforcement learning. While selecting exploratory goals at the frontier of previously explored states is an effective strategy, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-05 Yuanlin Duan , Guofeng Cui , He Zhu

Efficient exploration in reinforcement learning is a challenging problem commonly addressed through intrinsic rewards. Recent prominent approaches are based on state novelty or variants of artificial curiosity. However, directly applying…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-21 Aditya Ramesh , Louis Kirsch , Sjoerd van Steenkiste , Jürgen Schmidhuber

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 analyze the efficiency of parallelization and restart mechanisms for stochastic simulations in model-free settings, where the underlying system dynamics are unknown. Such settings are common in Reinforcement Learning (RL) and rare event…

Probability · Mathematics 2026-05-07 Ernesto Garcia , Paola Bermolen , Matthieu Jonckheere , Seva Shneer

Unsupervised Reinforcement Learning (RL) aims to discover diverse behaviors that can accelerate the learning of downstream tasks. Previous methods typically focus on entropy-based exploration or empowerment-driven skill learning. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-18 Ting Xiao , Jiakun Zheng , Rushuai Yang , Kang Xu , Qiaosheng Zhang , Peng Liu , Chenjia Bai

Exploration is one of the core challenges in reinforcement learning. A common formulation of curiosity-driven exploration uses the difference between the real future and the future predicted by a learned model. However, predicting the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-19 Victoria Dean , Shubham Tulsiani , Abhinav Gupta