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Learning in environments with sparse rewards remains a fundamental challenge in reinforcement learning. Artificial curiosity addresses this limitation through intrinsic rewards to guide exploration, however, the precise formulation of these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-20 Alexander Nedergaard , Pablo A. Morales

Model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) is believed to have higher sample efficiency compared with model-free reinforcement learning (MFRL). However, MBRL is plagued by dynamics bottleneck dilemma. Dynamics bottleneck dilemma is the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-25 Xiyao Wang , Junge Zhang , Wenzhen Huang , Qiyue Yin

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

Solving real-life sequential decision making problems under partial observability involves an exploration-exploitation problem. To be successful, an agent needs to efficiently gather valuable information about the state of the world for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-03 Haiyan Yin , Yingzhen Li , Sinno Jialin Pan , Cheng Zhang , Sebastian Tschiatschek

Exploration in high-dimensional, continuous spaces with sparse rewards is an open problem in reinforcement learning. Artificial curiosity algorithms address this by creating rewards that lead to exploration. Given a reinforcement learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-08 Alexander Nedergaard , Matthew Cook

Several recent works have been dedicated to unsupervised reinforcement learning in a single environment, in which a policy is first pre-trained with unsupervised interactions, and then fine-tuned towards the optimal policy for several…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-17 Mirco Mutti , Mattia Mancassola , Marcello Restelli

We consider a ubiquitous scenario in the Internet economy when individual decision-makers (henceforth, agents) both produce and consume information as they make strategic choices in an uncertain environment. This creates a three-way…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2021-04-09 Yishay Mansour , Aleksandrs Slivkins , Vasilis Syrgkanis , Zhiwei Steven Wu

A promising technique for exploration is to maximize the entropy of visited state distribution, i.e., state entropy, by encouraging uniform coverage of visited state space. While it has been effective for an unsupervised setup, it tends to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-12 Dongyoung Kim , Jinwoo Shin , Pieter Abbeel , Younggyo Seo

Efficient exploration remains a central challenge in reinforcement learning, serving as a useful pretraining objective for data collection, particularly when an external reward function is unavailable. A principled formulation of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-16 Jacob Adamczyk , Adam Kamoski , Rahul V. Kulkarni

In online reinforcement learning (online RL), balancing exploration and exploitation is crucial for finding an optimal policy in a sample-efficient way. To achieve this, existing sample-efficient online RL algorithms typically consist of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-26 Zhihan Liu , Miao Lu , Wei Xiong , Han Zhong , Hao Hu , Shenao Zhang , Sirui Zheng , Zhuoran Yang , Zhaoran Wang

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…

Building agents that can explore their environments intelligently is a challenging open problem. In this paper, we make a step towards understanding how a hierarchical design of the agent's policy can affect its exploration capabilities.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-11-19 Maruan Al-Shedivat , Lisa Lee , Ruslan Salakhutdinov , Eric Xing

This paper addresses the exploration-exploitation dilemma inherent in decision-making, focusing on multi-armed bandit problems. The problems involve an agent deciding whether to exploit current knowledge for immediate gains or explore new…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-07-06 Alex Barbier-Chebbah , Christian L. Vestergaard , Jean-Baptiste Masson

In real-life complex systems, individuals often encounter multiple social dilemmas that cannot be effectively captured using a single-game model. Furthermore, the environment and limited resources both play a crucial role in shaping…

Physics and Society · Physics 2025-04-15 Chengbin Sun , Alfonso de Miguel-Arribas , Chaoqian Wang , Haoxiang Xia , Yamir Moreno

Exploration is a key problem in reinforcement learning, since agents can only learn from data they acquire in the environment. With that in mind, maintaining a population of agents is an attractive method, as it allows data be collected…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-08 Jack Parker-Holder , Aldo Pacchiano , Krzysztof Choromanski , Stephen Roberts

Our work is a simple extension of the paper "Exploration by Random Network Distillation". More in detail, we show how to efficiently combine Intrinsic Rewards with Experience Replay in order to achieve more efficient and robust exploration…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-03 Francesco Sovrano

What drives exploration? Understanding intrinsic motivation is a long-standing challenge in both cognitive science and artificial intelligence; numerous objectives have been proposed and used to train agents, yet there remains a gap between…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-05-29 Aly Lidayan , Yuqing Du , Eliza Kosoy , Maria Rufova , Pieter Abbeel , Alison Gopnik

Contextual bandits can solve a huge range of real-world problems. However, current popular algorithms to solve them either rely on linear models, or unreliable uncertainty estimation in non-linear models, which are required to deal with the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-01 Adam Elwood , Marco Leonardi , Ashraf Mohamed , Alessandro Rozza

A well-balanced exploration-exploitation trade-off is crucial for successful acquisition functions in Bayesian optimization. However, there is a lack of quantitative measures for exploration, making it difficult to analyze and compare…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Leonard Papenmeier , Nuojin Cheng , Stephen Becker , Luigi Nardi

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