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Related papers: The Exploration-Exploitation Dilemma Revisited: An…

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Exploration is widely regarded as one of the most challenging aspects of reinforcement learning (RL), with many naive approaches succumbing to exponential sample complexity. To isolate the challenges of exploration, we propose a new…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-10 Chi Jin , Akshay Krishnamurthy , Max Simchowitz , Tiancheng Yu

How do you incentivize self-interested agents to $\textit{explore}$ when they prefer to $\textit{exploit}$? We consider complex exploration problems, where each agent faces the same (but unknown) MDP. In contrast with traditional…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-21 Max Simchowitz , Aleksandrs Slivkins

Exploration remains a central challenge for reinforcement learning (RL). Virtually all existing methods share the feature of a monolithic behaviour policy that changes only gradually (at best). In contrast, the exploratory behaviours of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-07 Miruna Pîslar , David Szepesvari , Georg Ostrovski , Diana Borsa , Tom Schaul

Large Language Models (LLMs) have become integral components in various autonomous agent systems. In this study, we present an exploration-based trajectory optimization approach, referred to as ETO. This learning method is designed to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-07-11 Yifan Song , Da Yin , Xiang Yue , Jie Huang , Sujian Li , Bill Yuchen Lin

A default assumption in the design of reinforcement-learning algorithms is that a decision-making agent always explores to learn optimal behavior. In sufficiently complex environments that approach the vastness and scale of the real world,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-23 Dilip Arumugam , Saurabh Kumar , Ramki Gummadi , Benjamin Van Roy

The exploration-exploitation dilemma in reinforcement learning (RL) is a fundamental challenge to efficient RL algorithms. Existing algorithms for finite state and action discounted RL problems address this by assuming sufficient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-09 Caleb Ju , Guanghui Lan

Mutual relationships, such as cooperation and exploitation, are the basis of human and other biological societies. The foundations of these relationships are rooted in the decision making of individuals, and whether they choose to be…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-09-29 Yuma Fujimoto , Kunihiko Kaneko

Improving the decision-making capabilities of agents is a key challenge on the road to artificial intelligence. To improve the planning skills needed to make good decisions, MuZero's agent combines prediction by a network model and planning…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-06-07 Matthias Unverzagt

We consider an agent's uncertainty about its environment and the problem of generalizing this uncertainty across observations. Specifically, we focus on the problem of exploration in non-tabular reinforcement learning. Drawing inspiration…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-07-11 Marc G. Bellemare , Sriram Srinivasan , Georg Ostrovski , Tom Schaul , David Saxton , Remi Munos

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-10 Woojun Kim , Jeonghye Kim , Youngchul Sung

A grand challenge in reinforcement learning is intelligent exploration, especially when rewards are sparse or deceptive. Two Atari games serve as benchmarks for such hard-exploration domains: Montezuma's Revenge and Pitfall. On both games,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-02 Adrien Ecoffet , Joost Huizinga , Joel Lehman , Kenneth O. Stanley , Jeff Clune

The exploration--exploitation trade-off in reinforcement learning (RL) is a well-known and much-studied problem that balances greedy action selection with novel experience, and the study of exploration methods is usually only considered in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-13 Jonathan C Balloch , Julia Kim , and Jessica L Inman , Mark O Riedl

In many sequential decision-making problems, the goal is to optimize a utility function while satisfying a set of constraints on different utilities. This learning problem is formalized through Constrained Markov Decision Processes (CMDPs).…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-05 Yonathan Efroni , Shie Mannor , Matteo Pirotta

Planning with options -- a sequence of primitive actions -- has been shown effective in reinforcement learning within complex environments. Previous studies have focused on planning with predefined options or learned options through expert…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-03-24 Po-Wei Huang , Pei-Chiun Peng , Hung Guei , Ti-Rong Wu

Reinforcement Learning has emerged as a strong alternative to solve optimization tasks efficiently. The use of these algorithms highly depends on the feedback signals provided by the environment in charge of informing about how good (or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-01 Alain Andres , Esther Villar-Rodriguez , Javier Del Ser

A sequential decision-making agent balances between exploring to gain new knowledge about an environment and exploiting current knowledge to maximize immediate reward. For environments studied in the traditional literature, optimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-23 Dilip Arumugam , Wanqiao Xu , Benjamin Van Roy

We develop a probabilistic framework for analysing model-based reinforcement learning in the episodic setting. We then apply it to study finite-time horizon stochastic control problems with linear dynamics but unknown coefficients and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-22 Lukasz Szpruch , Tanut Treetanthiploet , Yufei Zhang

This paper examines the exploration-exploitation trade-off in reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR), a framework for improving the reasoning of Large Language Models (LLMs). Recent studies suggest that RLVR can elicit strong…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-27 Peter Chen , Xiaopeng Li , Ziniu Li , Wotao Yin , Xi Chen , Tianyi Lin

Embodied exploration is a target-driven process that requires embodied agents to possess fine-grained perception and knowledge-enhanced decision making. While recent attempts leverage MLLMs for exploration due to their strong perceptual and…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-11-25 Gengyuan Zhang , Mingcong Ding , Jingpei Wu , Ruotong Liao , Volker Tresp

Exploration is one of the most important tasks in Reinforcement Learning, but it is not well-defined beyond finite problems in the Dynamic Programming paradigm (see Subsection 2.4). We provide a reinterpretation of exploration which can be…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-11-24 John C. Raisbeck , Matthew W. Allen , Hakho Lee