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Reinforcement learning algorithms describe how an agent can learn an optimal action policy in a sequential decision process, through repeated experience. In a given environment, the agent policy provides him some running and terminal…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2020-03-24 Arthur Charpentier , Romuald Elie , Carl Remlinger

Reinforcement learning has shown great promise in robotics thanks to its ability to develop efficient robotic control procedures through self-training. In particular, reinforcement learning has been successfully applied to solving the…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-11-12 Pierre Aumjaud , David McAuliffe , Francisco Javier Rodríguez Lera , Philip Cardiff

We introduce Random Reward Perturbation (RRP), a novel exploration strategy for reinforcement learning (RL). Our theoretical analyses demonstrate that adding zero-mean noise to environmental rewards effectively enhances policy diversity…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-11 Haozhe Ma , Guoji Fu , Zhengding Luo , Jiele Wu , Tze-Yun Leong

Intrinsic rewards can improve exploration in reinforcement learning, but the exploration process may suffer from instability caused by non-stationary reward shaping and strong dependency on hyperparameters. In this work, we introduce…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-10 Lukas Schäfer , Filippos Christianos , Josiah P. Hanna , Stefano V. Albrecht

Reinforcement learning (RL) is one of the three basic paradigms of machine learning. It has demonstrated impressive performance in many complex tasks like Go and StarCraft, which is increasingly involved in smart manufacturing and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-03 Mingqi Yuan

The reward signal plays a central role in defining the desired behaviors of agents in reinforcement learning (RL). Rewards collected from realistic environments could be perturbed, corrupted, or noisy due to an adversary, sensor error, or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-12 Xi Chen , Zhihui Zhu , Andrew Perrault

Balancing exploration and exploitation is a fundamental part of reinforcement learning, yet most state-of-the-art algorithms use a naive exploration protocol like $\epsilon$-greedy. This contributes to the problem of high sample complexity,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-21 Tom Blau , Lionel Ott , Fabio Ramos

This paper presents a novel form of policy gradient for model-free reinforcement learning (RL) with improved exploration properties. Current policy-based methods use entropy regularization to encourage undirected exploration of the reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-03-17 Ofir Nachum , Mohammad Norouzi , Dale Schuurmans

While routing in wireless networks has been studied extensively, existing protocols are typically designed for a specific set of network conditions and so cannot accommodate any drastic changes in those conditions. For instance, protocols…

Networking and Internet Architecture · Computer Science 2021-01-01 Victoria Manfredi , Alicia Wolfe , Bing Wang , Xiaolan Zhang

In this paper, we propose a novel perturbation-based exploration method in bandit algorithms with bounded or unbounded rewards, called residual bootstrap exploration (\texttt{ReBoot}). The \texttt{ReBoot} enforces exploration by injecting…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-02-21 Chi-Hua Wang , Yang Yu , Botao Hao , Guang Cheng

In the era of deep reinforcement learning, making progress is more complex, as the collected experience must be compressed into a deep model for future exploitation and sampling. Many papers have shown that training a deep learning policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-05 Glen Berseth

Sparsity of rewards while applying a deep reinforcement learning method negatively affects its sample-efficiency. A viable solution to deal with the sparsity of rewards is to learn via intrinsic motivation which advocates for adding an…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-02-22 Jiong Li , Pratik Gajane

Exploration is essential in reinforcement learning as an agent relies on trial and error to learn an optimal policy. However, when rewards are sparse, naive exploration strategies, like noise injection, are often insufficient. Intrinsic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-30 Minjae Cho , Huy Trong Tran

In continuous action domains, standard deep reinforcement learning algorithms like DDPG suffer from inefficient exploration when facing sparse or deceptive reward problems. Conversely, evolutionary and developmental methods focusing on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-09-21 Cédric Colas , Olivier Sigaud , Pierre-Yves Oudeyer

The objective of a reinforcement learning agent is to discover better actions through exploration. However, typical exploration techniques aim to maximize rewards, often incurring high costs in both exploration and learning processes. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-24 Akane Tsuboya , Yu Kono , Tatsuji Takahashi

Learning a policy capable of moving an agent between any two states in the environment is important for many robotics problems involving navigation and manipulation. Due to the sparsity of rewards in such tasks, applying reinforcement…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-07-05 Artem Molchanov , Karol Hausman , Stan Birchfield , Gaurav Sukhatme

Self-paced reinforcement learning (RL) aims to improve the data efficiency of learning by automatically creating sequences, namely curricula, of probability distributions over contexts. However, existing techniques for self-paced RL fail in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-29 Cevahir Koprulu , Ufuk Topcu

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

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

We introduce Random Latent Exploration (RLE), a simple yet effective exploration strategy in reinforcement learning (RL). On average, RLE outperforms noise-based methods, which perturb the agent's actions, and bonus-based exploration, which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-28 Srinath Mahankali , Zhang-Wei Hong , Ayush Sekhari , Alexander Rakhlin , Pulkit Agrawal