Related papers: Effective Exploration Based on the Structural Info…

One of the most critical challenges in deep reinforcement learning is to maintain the long-term exploration capability of the agent. To tackle this problem, it has been recently proposed to provide intrinsic rewards for the agent to…

Expected free energy (EFE) is a central quantity in active inference which has recently gained popularity due to its intuitive decomposition of the expected value of control into a pragmatic and an epistemic component. While numerous…

We consider the task of estimating a structural model of dynamic decisions by a human agent based upon the observable history of implemented actions and visited states. This problem has an inherent nested structure: in the inner problem, an…

We explore the application of a new theory of Semantic Information to the well-motivated problem of a resource foraging agent. Semantic information is defined as the subset of correlations, measured via the transfer entropy, between agent…

Reinforcement learning has been shown to be highly successful at many challenging tasks. However, success heavily relies on well-shaped rewards. Intrinsically motivated RL attempts to remove this constraint by defining an intrinsic reward…

End-to-end (E2E) training, optimizing the entire model through error backpropagation, fundamentally supports the advancements of deep learning. Despite its high performance, E2E training faces the problems of memory consumption, parallel…

Reinforcement learners are agents that learn to pick actions that lead to high reward. Ideally, the value of a reinforcement learner's policy approaches optimality--where the optimal informed policy is the one which maximizes reward.…

Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has achieved remarkable success in sequential decision-making problems. However, existing DRL agents make decisions in an opaque fashion, hindering the user from establishing trust and scrutinizing…

Serving as an essential prerequisite for modern power system operation, robust state estimation (RSE) could effectively resist noises and outliers in measurements. The emerging neural network (NN) based end-to-end (E2E) learning framework…

The ability to explore efficiently and effectively is a central challenge of reinforcement learning. In this work, we consider exploration through the lens of information theory. Specifically, we cast exploration as a problem of maximizing…

Physical construction---the ability to compose objects, subject to physical dynamics, to serve some function---is fundamental to human intelligence. We introduce a suite of challenging physical construction tasks inspired by how children…

Efficient exploration is critical in cooperative deep Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL). In this work, we propose an exploration method that effectively encourages cooperative exploration based on the idea of sequential…

Combining Chain-of-Thought (CoT) with Reinforcement Learning (RL) improves text-to-image (T2I) generation, yet the underlying interaction between CoT's exploration and RL's optimization remains unclear. We present a systematic entropy-based…

The principles of statistical mechanics and information theory play an important role in learning and have inspired both theory and the design of numerous machine learning algorithms. The new aspect in this paper is a focus on integrating…

We propose and design recommendation systems that incentivize efficient exploration. Agents arrive sequentially, choose actions and receive rewards, drawn from fixed but unknown action-specific distributions. The recommendation system…

Information theory is a powerful tool to express principles to drive autonomous systems because it is domain invariant and allows for an intuitive interpretation. This paper studies the use of the predictive information (PI), also called…

In a feedforward network, Transfer Entropy (TE) can be used to measure the influence that one layer has on another by quantifying the information transfer between them during training. According to the Information Bottleneck principle, a…

Although exploration in reinforcement learning is well understood from a theoretical point of view, provably correct methods remain impractical. In this paper we study the interplay between exploration and approximation, what we call…

We formalize Rollout Informativeness under a Fixed Budget (RIFB) as the expected non-vanishing policy-gradient mass that a tool-use rollout set injects into Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). We prove that any budget-agnostic…

Deep Reinforcement Learning (Deep RL) and Evolutionary Algorithms (EA) are two major paradigms of policy optimization with distinct learning principles, i.e., gradient-based v.s. gradient-free. An appealing research direction is integrating…