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Sequential decision tasks with incomplete information are characterized by the exploration problem; namely the trade-off between further exploration for learning more about the environment and immediate exploitation of the accrued…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2013-02-21 Grigoris I. Karakoulas

Efficient reinforcement learning (RL) involves a trade-off between "exploitative" actions that maximise expected reward and "explorative'" ones that sample unvisited states. To encourage exploration, recent approaches proposed adding…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-01 Changmin Yu , David Mguni , Dong Li , Aivar Sootla , Jun Wang , Neil Burgess

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

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

Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a powerful method for improving the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs). Outcome-based RL, which rewards policies solely for the correctness of the final answer, yields substantial…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-09 Yuda Song , Julia Kempe , Remi Munos

We study multi-objective reinforcement learning with nonlinear preferences over trajectories. That is, we maximize the expected value of a nonlinear function over accumulated rewards (expected scalarized return or ESR) in a multi-objective…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-19 Nianli Peng , Muhang Tian , Brandon Fain

Exploration is fundamental to reinforcement learning (RL), as it determines how effectively an agent discovers and exploits the underlying structure of its environment to achieve optimal performance. Existing exploration methods generally…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-30 Likun Wang , Xiangteng Zhang , Yinuo Wang , Guojian Zhan , Wenxuan Wang , Haoyu Gao , Jingliang Duan , Shengbo Eben Li

We study a speculative trading problem within the exploratory reinforcement learning (RL) framework of Wang et al. [2020]. The problem is formulated as a sequential optimal stopping problem over entry and exit times under general utility…

Mathematical Finance · Quantitative Finance 2026-04-03 Yun Zhao , Alex S. L. Tse , Harry Zheng

We consider a setting for Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) where the learner is extended with the ability to actively select multiple environments, observing an agent's behavior on each environment. We first demonstrate that if the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2016-01-26 Kareem Amin , Satinder Singh

We introduce exploration potential, a quantity that measures how much a reinforcement learning agent has explored its environment class. In contrast to information gain, exploration potential takes the problem's reward structure into…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-11-21 Jan Leike

Designing reliable decision strategies for autonomous urban driving is challenging. Reinforcement learning (RL) has been used to automatically derive suitable behavior in uncertain environments, but it does not provide any guarantee on the…

Reinforcement learning agents need exploratory behaviors to escape from local optima. These behaviors may include both immediate dithering perturbation and temporally consistent exploration. To achieve these, a stochastic policy model that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-12-27 Sirui Xie , Junning Huang , Lanxin Lei , Chunxiao Liu , Zheng Ma , Wei Zhang , Liang Lin

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

This paper studies the continuous-time reinforcement learning (RL) for optimal switching problems across multiple regimes. We consider a type of exploratory formulation under entropy regularization where the agent randomizes both the timing…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-12-23 Yijie Huang , Mengge Li , Xiang Yu , Zhou Zhou

We investigate the challenge of parametrizing policies for reinforcement learning (RL) in high-dimensional continuous action spaces. Our objective is to develop a multimodal policy that overcomes limitations inherent in the commonly-used…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-21 Zhiao Huang , Litian Liang , Zhan Ling , Xuanlin Li , Chuang Gan , Hao Su

In lifelong learning, an agent learns throughout its entire life without resets, in a constantly changing environment, as we humans do. Consequently, lifelong learning comes with a plethora of research problems such as continual domain…

Effective exploration is critical for reinforcement learning agents in environments with sparse rewards or high-dimensional state-action spaces. Recent works based on state-visitation counts, curiosity and entropy-maximization generate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-13 Bang You , Jingming Xie , Youping Chen , Jan Peters , Oleg Arenz

Balancing exploration and exploitation remains a key challenge in reinforcement learning (RL). State-of-the-art RL algorithms suffer from high sample complexity, particularly in the sparse reward case, where they can do no better than to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-22 Philippe Morere , Gilad Francis , Tom Blau , Fabio Ramos

Learning in sparse reward settings remains a challenge in Reinforcement Learning, which is often addressed by using intrinsic rewards. One promising strategy is inspired by human curiosity, requiring the agent to learn to predict the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-10-02 Gino Brunner , Manuel Fritsche , Oliver Richter , Roger Wattenhofer

Recent advancements have shown that reinforcement learning (RL) can substantially improve the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs). The effectiveness of such RL training, however, depends critically on the exploration space…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Haoyuan Wu , Hai Wang , Jiajia Wu , Jinxiang Ou , Keyao Wang , Weile Chen , Zihao Zheng , Bei Yu