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Starting from Robbins (1952), the literature on experimentation via multi-armed bandits has wed exploration and exploitation. Nonetheless, in many applications, agents' exploration and exploitation need not be intertwined: a policymaker may…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2024-05-01 Alessandro Lizzeri , Eran Shmaya , Leeat Yariv

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

Existing approaches for improving generalization in deep reinforcement learning (RL) have mostly focused on representation learning, neglecting RL-specific aspects such as exploration. We hypothesize that the agent's exploration strategy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-12 Yiding Jiang , J. Zico Kolter , Roberta Raileanu

The exploration \& exploitation dilemma poses significant challenges in reinforcement learning (RL). Recently, curiosity-based exploration methods achieved great success in tackling hard-exploration problems. However, they necessitate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-06 Yiran Wang , Chenshu Liu , Yunfan Li , Sanae Amani , Bolei Zhou , Lin F. Yang

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has catalyzed significant advances in the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, effectively managing the exploration and exploitation trade-off remains a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-16 Xiaofan Li , Ming Yang , Zhiyuan Ma , Shichao Ma , Jintao Du , Yu Cheng , Weiqiang Wang , Zhizhong Zhang , Xin Tan , Yanyun Qu , Lizhuang Ma , Yuan Xie

Exploration is widely regarded as one of the most challenging aspects of reinforcement learning (RL), with many naive approaches succumbing to exponential sample complexity. To isolate the challenges of exploration, we propose a new…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-10 Chi Jin , Akshay Krishnamurthy , Max Simchowitz , Tiancheng Yu

All reinforcement learning algorithms must handle the trade-off between exploration and exploitation. Many state-of-the-art deep reinforcement learning methods use noise in the action selection, such as Gaussian noise in policy gradient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-04-05 Trevor Barron , Oliver Obst , Heni Ben Amor

A reinforcement learning agent tries to maximize its cumulative payoff by interacting in an unknown environment. It is important for the agent to explore suboptimal actions as well as to pick actions with highest known rewards. Yet, in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-01-23 Reazul Hasan Russel

Although exploratory behaviors are ubiquitous in the animal kingdom, their computational underpinnings are still largely unknown. Behavioral Psychology has identified learning as a primary drive underlying many exploratory behaviors.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2011-12-14 Daniel Y. Little , Friedrich T. Sommer

Despite their success in many domains, large language models (LLMs) remain under-studied in scenarios requiring optimal decision-making under uncertainty. This is crucial as many real-world applications, ranging from personalized…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-15 Allen Nie , Yi Su , Bo Chang , Jonathan N. Lee , Ed H. Chi , Quoc V. Le , Minmin Chen

Exploration is a crucial and distinctive aspect of reinforcement learning (RL) that remains a fundamental open problem. Several methods have been proposed to tackle this challenge. Commonly used methods inject random noise directly into the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-06 Sebastian Griesbach , Carlo D'Eramo

Exploration has been a crucial part of reinforcement learning, yet several important questions concerning exploration efficiency are still not answered satisfactorily by existing analytical frameworks. These questions include exploration…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-12-06 Liangpeng Zhang , Ke Tang , Xin Yao

Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged with many intellectual capacities. While numerous benchmarks assess their intelligence, limited attention has been given to their ability to explore--an essential capacity for discovering new…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-05-13 Lan Pan , Hanbo Xie , Robert C. Wilson

Efficient exploration is a long-standing problem in sensorimotor learning. Major advances have been demonstrated in noise-free, non-stochastic domains such as video games and simulation. However, most of these formulations either get stuck…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-11 Deepak Pathak , Dhiraj Gandhi , Abhinav Gupta

Exploration is an extremely challenging problem in reinforcement learning, especially in high dimensional state and action spaces and when only sparse rewards are available. Effective representations can indicate which components of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-31 Giulia Vezzani , Abhishek Gupta , Lorenzo Natale , Pieter Abbeel

Exploration is critical to a reinforcement learning agent's performance in its given environment. Prior exploration methods are often based on using heuristic auxiliary predictions to guide policy behavior, lacking a mathematically-grounded…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-02 Lisa Lee , Benjamin Eysenbach , Emilio Parisotto , Eric Xing , Sergey Levine , Ruslan Salakhutdinov

Multilingual reasoning remains a significant challenge for large language models (LLMs), with performance disproportionately favoring high-resource languages. Drawing inspiration from cognitive neuroscience, which suggests that human…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-12 Weixiang Zhao , Jiahe Guo , Yang Deng , Tongtong Wu , Wenxuan Zhang , Yulin Hu , Xingyu Sui , Yanyan Zhao , Wanxiang Che , Bing Qin , Tat-Seng Chua , Ting Liu

Effective exploration in reinforcement learning requires not only tracking where an agent has been, but also understanding how the agent perceives and represents the world. To learn powerful representations, an agent should actively explore…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Faisal Mohamed , Catherine Ji , Benjamin Eysenbach , Glen Berseth

Developmental machine learning studies how artificial agents can model the way children learn open-ended repertoires of skills. Such agents need to create and represent goals, select which ones to pursue and learn to achieve them. Recent…

We present a new model-based algorithm for reinforcement learning (RL) which consists of explicit exploration and exploitation phases, and is applicable in large or infinite state spaces. The algorithm maintains a set of dynamics models…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-03 Mikael Henaff