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The effectiveness of model training heavily relies on the quality of available training resources. However, budget constraints often impose limitations on data collection efforts. To tackle this challenge, we introduce causal exploration in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-31 Yupei Yang , Biwei Huang , Shikui Tu , Lei Xu

Exploration in environments with sparse rewards has been a persistent problem in reinforcement learning (RL). Many tasks are natural to specify with a sparse reward, and manually shaping a reward function can result in suboptimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-02-27 Ashvin Nair , Bob McGrew , Marcin Andrychowicz , Wojciech Zaremba , Pieter Abbeel

Counterfactual instances are a powerful tool to obtain valuable insights into automated decision processes, describing the necessary minimal changes in the input space to alter the prediction towards a desired target. Most previous…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-07 Robert-Florian Samoilescu , Arnaud Van Looveren , Janis Klaise

The aim of multi-task reinforcement learning is two-fold: (1) efficiently learn by training against multiple tasks and (2) quickly adapt, using limited samples, to a variety of new tasks. In this work, the tasks correspond to reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-05 Nicholas C. Landolfi , Garrett Thomas , Tengyu Ma

This paper investigates how to incorporate expert observations (without explicit information on expert actions) into a deep reinforcement learning setting to improve sample efficiency. First, we formulate an augmented policy loss combining…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-28 Erhan Can Ozcan , Vittorio Giammarino , James Queeney , Ioannis Ch. Paschalidis

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

Learning effective representations in image-based environments is crucial for sample efficient Reinforcement Learning (RL). Unfortunately, in RL, representation learning is confounded with the exploratory experience of the agent -- learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-21 Denis Yarats , Rob Fergus , Alessandro Lazaric , Lerrel Pinto

Reinforcement learning has been established over the past decade as an effective tool to find optimal control policies for dynamical systems, with recent focus on approaches that guarantee safety during the learning and/or execution phases.…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2021-10-06 S M Nahid Mahmud , Scott A Nivison , Zachary I. Bell , Rushikesh Kamalapurkar

Model-free reinforcement learning algorithms can compute policy gradients given sampled environment transitions, but require large amounts of data. In contrast, model-based methods can use the learned model to generate new data, but model…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-04 Lukas P. Fröhlich , Maksym Lefarov , Melanie N. Zeilinger , Felix Berkenkamp

Exploration in multi-task reinforcement learning is critical in training agents to deduce the underlying MDP. Many of the existing exploration frameworks such as $E^3$, $R_{max}$, Thompson sampling assume a single stationary MDP and are not…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2016-12-04 Sai Praveen Bangaru , JS Suhas , Balaraman Ravindran

Scaling reinforcement learning to tens of thousands of parallel environments requires overcoming the limited exploration capacity of a single policy. Ensemble-based policy gradient methods, which employ multiple policies to collect diverse…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-04 Naoki Shitanda , Motoki Omura , Tatsuya Harada , Takayuki Osa

We consider the problem of finding a policy that maximizes an expected reward throughout the trajectory of an agent that interacts with an unknown environment. Frequently denoted Reinforcement Learning, this framework suffers from the need…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2020-09-30 Juan Cervino , Harshat Kumar , Alejandro Ribeiro

Exploration is an essential component of reinforcement learning algorithms, where agents need to learn how to predict and control unknown and often stochastic environments. Reinforcement learning agents depend crucially on exploration to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-03 Susan Amin , Maziar Gomrokchi , Harsh Satija , Herke van Hoof , Doina Precup

Model-Based Reinforcement Learning (MBRL) offers a promising direction for sample efficient learning, often achieving state of the art results for continuous control tasks. However, many existing MBRL methods rely on combining greedy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-10 Philip Ball , Jack Parker-Holder , Aldo Pacchiano , Krzysztof Choromanski , Stephen Roberts

We study the challenging exploration incentive problem in both bandit and reinforcement learning, where the rewards are scale-free and potentially unbounded, driven by real-world scenarios and differing from existing work. Past works in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-07 Mengfan Xu , Diego Klabjan

Reward-free reinforcement learning (RF-RL), a recently introduced RL paradigm, relies on random action-taking to explore the unknown environment without any reward feedback information. While the primary goal of the exploration phase in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-23 Ruiquan Huang , Jing Yang , Yingbin Liang

Exploration is a crucial skill for in-context reinforcement learning in unknown environments. However, it remains unclear if large language models can effectively explore a partially hidden state space. This work isolates exploration as the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-26 Tim Grams , Patrick Betz , Sascha Marton , Stefan Lüdtke , Christian Bartelt

Model-free reinforcement learning based methods such as Proximal Policy Optimization, or Q-learning typically require thousands of interactions with the environment to approximate the optimum controller which may not always be feasible in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-16 Narendra Patwardhan , Zequn Wang

Optimal stopping problems consider the question of deciding when to stop an observation-generating process in order to maximize a return. We examine the problem of simultaneously learning and planning in such domains, when data is collected…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-05-25 Karan Goel , Christoph Dann , Emma Brunskill

Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents often struggle with inefficient exploration, particularly in environments with sparse rewards. Traditional exploration strategies can lead to slow learning and suboptimal performance because agents fail to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Gaurav Chaudhary , Laxmidhar Behera , Washim Uddin Mondal