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Related papers: Exploration by Running Away from the Past

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Efficient exploration is an unsolved problem in Reinforcement Learning which is usually addressed by reactively rewarding the agent for fortuitously encountering novel situations. This paper introduces an efficient active exploration…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-17 Pranav Shyam , Wojciech Jaśkowski , Faustino Gomez

Reinforcement Learning is a powerful tool to model decision-making processes. However, it relies on an exploration-exploitation trade-off that remains an open challenge for many tasks. In this work, we study neighboring state-based,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-04 Yu-Teng Li , Justin Lin , Jeffery Cheng , Pedro Pachuca

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

The infamous exploration-exploitation dilemma is one of the oldest and most important problems in reinforcement learning (RL). Deliberate and effective exploration is necessary for RL agents to succeed in most environments. However, until…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-10-09 Suraj Narayanan Sasikumar

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

High sample complexity remains a barrier to the application of reinforcement learning (RL), particularly in multi-agent systems. A large body of work has demonstrated that exploration mechanisms based on the principle of optimism under…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-08-02 Robert Loftin , Aadirupa Saha , Sam Devlin , Katja Hofmann

The study of exploration in the domain of decision making has a long history but remains actively debated. From the vast literature that addressed this topic for decades under various points of view (e.g., developmental psychology,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-14 Léonard Hussenot , Robert Dadashi , Matthieu Geist , Olivier Pietquin

The multi-agent setting is intricate and unpredictable since the behaviors of multiple agents influence one another. To address this environmental uncertainty, distributional reinforcement learning algorithms that incorporate uncertainty…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-06 Jihwan Oh , Joonkee Kim , Minchan Jeong , Se-Young Yun

A major challenge in reinforcement learning is the design of exploration strategies, especially for environments with sparse reward structures and continuous state and action spaces. Intuitively, if the reinforcement signal is very scarce,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-15 Susan Amin , Maziar Gomrokchi , Hossein Aboutalebi , Harsh Satija , Doina Precup

Recent advancements in deep reinforcement learning (RL) have demonstrated notable progress in sample efficiency, spanning both model-based and model-free paradigms. Despite the identification and mitigation of specific bottlenecks in prior…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-02 Yibo Wang , Jiang Zhao

The exploration-exploitation dilemma in reinforcement learning (RL) is a fundamental challenge to efficient RL algorithms. Existing algorithms for finite state and action discounted RL problems address this by assuming sufficient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-09 Caleb Ju , Guanghui Lan

Recent exploration methods have proven to be a recipe for improving sample-efficiency in deep reinforcement learning (RL). However, efficient exploration in high-dimensional observation spaces still remains a challenge. This paper presents…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-22 Younggyo Seo , Lili Chen , Jinwoo Shin , Honglak Lee , Pieter Abbeel , Kimin Lee

Entropy-based objectives are widely used to perform state space exploration in reinforcement learning (RL) and dataset generation for offline RL. Behavioral entropy (BE), a rigorous generalization of classical entropies that incorporates…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-07 Wesley A. Suttle , Aamodh Suresh , Carlos Nieto-Granda

Ensuring sufficient exploration is a central challenge when training meta-reinforcement learning (meta-RL) agents to solve novel environments. Conventional solutions to the exploration-exploitation dilemma inject explicit incentives such as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-05 Micah Rentschler , Jesse Roberts

A default assumption in the design of reinforcement-learning algorithms is that a decision-making agent always explores to learn optimal behavior. In sufficiently complex environments that approach the vastness and scale of the real world,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-23 Dilip Arumugam , Saurabh Kumar , Ramki Gummadi , Benjamin Van Roy

Exploration in environments with sparse rewards has been a persistent problem in reinforcement learning (RL). Many tasks are natural to specify with a sparse reward, and manually shaping a reward function can result in suboptimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-02-27 Ashvin Nair , Bob McGrew , Marcin Andrychowicz , Wojciech Zaremba , Pieter Abbeel

The exploration--exploitation trade-off in reinforcement learning (RL) is a well-known and much-studied problem that balances greedy action selection with novel experience, and the study of exploration methods is usually only considered in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-13 Jonathan C Balloch , Julia Kim , and Jessica L Inman , Mark O Riedl

Animals have a developed ability to explore that aids them in important tasks such as locating food, exploring for shelter, and finding misplaced items. These exploration skills necessarily track where they have been so that they can plan…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-27 Arnav Kumar Jain , Lucas Lehnert , Irina Rish , Glen Berseth

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

Most theories of behavior posit that agents tend to maximize some form of reward or utility. However, animals very often move with curiosity and seem to be motivated in a reward-free manner. Here we abandon the idea of reward maximization,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-02-27 Jorge Ramírez-Ruiz , Dmytro Grytskyy , Chiara Mastrogiuseppe , Yamen Habib , Rubén Moreno-Bote