Related papers: Epistemically-guided forward-backward exploration

Effective and intelligent exploration has been an unresolved problem for reinforcement learning. Most contemporary reinforcement learning relies on simple heuristic strategies such as $\epsilon$-greedy exploration or adding Gaussian noise…

Realistic environments often provide agents with very limited feedback. When the environment is initially unknown, the feedback, in the beginning, can be completely absent, and the agents may first choose to devote all their effort on…

Model-free or learning-based control, in particular, reinforcement learning (RL), is expected to be applied for complex robotic tasks. Traditional RL requires a policy to be optimized is state-dependent, that means, the policy is a kind of…

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…

The rising computational and energy demands of deep neural networks (DNNs), driven largely by backpropagation (BP), challenge sustainable AI development. This paper rigorously investigates three BP-free training methods: the Forward-Forward…

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…

Despite the close connection between exploration and sample efficiency, most state of the art reinforcement learning algorithms include no considerations for exploration beyond maximizing the entropy of the policy. In this work we address…

Performative reinforcement learning is an emerging dynamical decision making framework, which extends reinforcement learning to the common applications where the agent's policy can change the environmental dynamics. Existing works on…

Off-policy learning methods seek to derive an optimal policy directly from a fixed dataset of prior interactions. This objective presents significant challenges, primarily due to the inherent distributional shift and value function…

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,…

A key challenge to deploying reinforcement learning in practice is avoiding excessive (harmful) exploration in individual episodes. We propose a natural constraint on exploration -- \textit{uniformly} outperforming a conservative policy…

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…

Self-supervised representation learning has seen remarkable progress in the last few years, with some of the recent methods being able to learn useful image representations without labels. These methods are trained using backpropagation,…

Hierarchical reinforcement learning can improve generalization by decomposing long-horizon decision-making into simpler subproblems. However, existing approaches often rely on restrictive design choices, such as fixed temporal abstractions…

What is a good exploration strategy for an agent that interacts with an environment in the absence of external rewards? Ideally, we would like to get a policy driving towards a uniform state-action visitation (highly exploring) in a minimum…

Autonomous exploration of obstacle-rich spaces requires strategies that ensure efficiency while guaranteeing safety against collisions with obstacles. This paper investigates a novel platform-agnostic reinforcement learning framework that…

This paper presents a new method to learn online policies in continuous state, continuous action, model-free Markov decision processes, with two properties that are crucial for practical applications. First, the policies are implementable…

In federated learning (FL), clients with limited resources can disrupt the training efficiency. A potential solution to this problem is to leverage a new learning procedure that does not rely on backpropagation (BP). We present a novel…

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,…

Numerous past works have tackled the problem of task-driven navigation. But, how to effectively explore a new environment to enable a variety of down-stream tasks has received much less attention. In this work, we study how agents can…