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

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Encouraging exploration is a critical issue in deep reinforcement learning. We investigate the effect of initial entropy that significantly influences the exploration, especially at the earlier stage. Our main observations are as follows:…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-25 Sooyoung Jang , Hyung-Il Kim

AlphaZero is a self-play reinforcement learning algorithm that achieves superhuman play in chess, shogi, and Go via policy iteration. To be an effective policy improvement operator, AlphaZero's search requires accurate value estimates for…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-03-02 Alexandre Trudeau , Michael Bowling

We study the problem of exploration in Reinforcement Learning and present a novel model-free solution. We adopt an information-theoretical viewpoint and start from the instance-specific lower bound of the number of samples that have to be…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-02 Alessio Russo , Alexandre Proutiere

The main objective of this paper is to outline a theoretical framework to analyse how humans' decision-making strategies under uncertainty manage the trade-off between information gathering (exploration) and reward seeking (exploitation). A…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-02-16 Antonio Candelieri , Andrea Ponti , Francesco Archetti

Exploration-exploitation dilemma has long been a crucial issue in reinforcement learning. In this paper, we propose a new approach to automatically balance between these two. Our method is built upon the Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) algorithm,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-03 Yufei Wang , Tianwei Ni

The promise of reinforcement learning is to solve complex sequential decision problems autonomously by specifying a high-level reward function only. However, reinforcement learning algorithms struggle when, as is often the case, simple and…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-09-17 Adrien Ecoffet , Joost Huizinga , Joel Lehman , Kenneth O. Stanley , Jeff Clune

Data selection is essential for any data-based optimization technique, such as Reinforcement Learning. State-of-the-art sampling strategies for the experience replay buffer improve the performance of the Reinforcement Learning agent.…

Zeroth-Order optimization presents a promising memory-efficient paradigm for fine-tuning Large Language Models by relying solely on forward passes. However, its practical adoption is severely constrained by slow wall-clock convergence and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Fei Wang , Li Shen , Liang Ding , Chao Xue , Ye Liu , Changxing Ding

Sufficient exploration is paramount for the success of a reinforcement learning agent. Yet, exploration is rarely assessed in an algorithm-independent way. We compare the behavior of three data-based, offline exploration metrics described…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-30 Jakob J. Hollenstein , Sayantan Auddy , Matteo Saveriano , Erwan Renaudo , Justus Piater

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Liang Chen , Xueting Han , Qizhou Wang , Bo Han , Jing Bai , Hinrich Schutze , Kam-Fai Wong

We address the challenge of exploration in reinforcement learning (RL) when the agent operates in an unknown environment with sparse or no rewards. In this work, we study the maximum entropy exploration problem of two different types. The…

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

LLM agents have shown strong performance across a wide range of complex tasks, including interactive environments that require long-horizon decision making. But these agents cannot learn on the fly at test time. Self-evolving agents address…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Yibo Li , Jiashuo Yang , Zhi Zheng , Zhiyuan Hu , Yuan Sui , Shizun Wang , Yufei He , Bryan Hooi

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

An agent learning through interactions should balance its action selection process between probing the environment to discover new rewards and using the information acquired in the past to adopt useful behaviour. This trade-off is usually…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-07-02 Lucas Beyer , Damien Vincent , Olivier Teboul , Sylvain Gelly , Matthieu Geist , Olivier Pietquin

Equipping artificial agents with useful exploration mechanisms remains a challenge to this day. Humans, on the other hand, seem to manage the trade-off between exploration and exploitation effortlessly. In the present article, we put…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-15 Marcel Binz , Eric Schulz

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-13 Andrew Wagenmaker , Max Simchowitz , Kevin Jamieson

Autonomous 3D environment exploration is a fundamental task for various applications such as navigation. The goal of exploration is to investigate a new environment and build its occupancy map efficiently. In this paper, we propose a new…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-11-03 Liu Juncheng , McCane Brendan , Mills Steven

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

Although exploratory behaviors are ubiquitous in the animal kingdom, their computational underpinnings are still largely unknown. Behavioral Psychology has identified learning as a primary drive underlying many exploratory behaviors.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2011-12-14 Daniel Y. Little , Friedrich T. Sommer