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Related papers: Exploration Unbound

200 papers

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…

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

In reinforcement learning, an agent interacts sequentially with an environment to maximize a reward, receiving only partial, probabilistic feedback. This creates a fundamental exploration-exploitation trade-off: the agent must explore to…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2026-03-27 Josep Lumbreras , Ruo Cheng Huang , Yanglin Hu , Marco Fanizza , Mile Gu

We consider a model of nomadic agents exploring and competing for time-varying location-specific resources, arising in crowdsourced transportation services, online communities, and in traditional location based economic activity. This model…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2016-02-23 Pu Yang , Krishnamurthy Iyer , Peter Frazier

Exploration is essential for reinforcement learning (RL). To face the challenges of exploration, we consider a reward-free RL framework that completely separates exploration from exploitation and brings new challenges for exploration…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-11 Chuheng Zhang , Yuanying Cai , Longbo Huang , Jian Li

This paper studies algorithmic decision-making under human's strategic behavior, where a decision maker uses an algorithm to make decisions about human agents, and the latter with information about the algorithm may exert effort…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-09-16 Tian Xie , Xuwei Tan , Xueru Zhang

Efficient exploration remains a challenging problem in reinforcement learning, especially for tasks where extrinsic rewards from environments are sparse or even totally disregarded. Significant advances based on intrinsic motivation show…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-03 Chenjia Bai , Peng Liu , Kaiyu Liu , Lingxiao Wang , Yingnan Zhao , Lei Han

We consider a model where an agent has a repeated decision to make and wishes to maximize their total payoff. Payoffs are influenced by an action taken by the agent, but also an unknown state of the world that evolves over time. Before…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2021-01-20 Nicole Immorlica , Ian Kash , Brendan Lucier

Recently, Frazier et al. proposed a natural model for crowdsourced exploration of different a priori unknown options: a principal is interested in the long-term welfare of a population of agents who arrive one by one in a multi-armed bandit…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2015-12-29 Li Han , David Kempe , Ruixin Qiang

We study online learning for optimal allocation when the resource to be allocated is time. %Examples of possible applications include job scheduling for a computing server, a driver filling a day with rides, a landlord renting an estate,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-11-05 Etienne Boursier , Tristan Garrec , Vianney Perchet , Marco Scarsini

We consider the problem of exploring an unknown tree with a team of $k$ initially colocated mobile agents. Each agent has limited energy and cannot, as a result, traverse more than $B$ edges. The goal is to maximize the number of nodes…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2018-02-20 Evangelos Bampas , Jérémie Chalopin , Shantanu Das , Jan Hackfeld , Christina Karousatou

Reward functions are easy to misspecify; although designers can make corrections after observing mistakes, an agent pursuing a misspecified reward function can irreversibly change the state of its environment. If that change precludes…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-06-11 Alexander Matt Turner , Dylan Hadfield-Menell , Prasad Tadepalli

Organisms and ecological groups accumulate evidence to make decisions. Classic experiments and theoretical studies have explored this process when the correct choice is fixed during each trial. However, we live in a constantly changing…

Neurons and Cognition · Quantitative Biology 2015-10-01 Alan Veliz-Cuba , Zachary P. Kilpatrick , Kresimir Josic

When does society eventually learn the truth, or take the correct action, via observational learning? In a general model of sequential learning over social networks, we identify a simple condition for learning dubbed excludability.…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2024-04-05 Navin Kartik , SangMok Lee , Tianhao Liu , Daniel Rappoport

We consider long-lived agents who interact repeatedly in a social network. In each period, each agent learns about an unknown state by observing a private signal and her neighbors' actions from the previous period before choosing her own…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2025-08-19 Florian Brandl

Snapshots of "best" (or "worst") experience are known to dominate human memory and may thus also have a significant effect on future behaviour. We consider here a model of repeated decision-making where, at every time step, an agent takes…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2022-02-18 Evangelos Mitsokapas , Rosemary J. Harris

Autonomous exploration in mobile robotics often involves a trade-off between two objectives: maximizing environmental coverage and minimizing the total path length. In the widely used information gain paradigm, exploration is guided by the…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-04-22 Ludvig Ericson , José Pedro , Patric Jensfelt

We study the problem of agent selection in causal strategic learning under multiple decision makers and address two key challenges that come with it. Firstly, while much of prior work focuses on studying a fixed pool of agents that remains…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-02-06 Kiet Q. H. Vo , Muneeb Aadil , Siu Lun Chau , Krikamol Muandet

Agents that learn to select optimal actions represent a prominent focus of the sequential decision-making literature. In the face of a complex environment or constraints on time and resources, however, aiming to synthesize such an optimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-23 Dilip Arumugam , Benjamin Van Roy

Solving tasks with sparse rewards is one of the most important challenges in reinforcement learning. In the single-agent setting, this challenge is addressed by introducing intrinsic rewards that motivate agents to explore unseen regions of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-25 Shariq Iqbal , Fei Sha