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Related papers: Epistemically-guided forward-backward exploration

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Research in reinforcement learning has produced algorithms for optimal decision making under uncertainty that fall within two main types. The first employs a Bayesian framework, where optimality improves with increased computational time.…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2011-09-22 Christos Dimitrakakis

Exploration is essential for reinforcement learning (RL). To face the challenges of exploration, we consider a reward-free RL framework that completely separates exploration from exploitation and brings new challenges for exploration…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-11 Chuheng Zhang , Yuanying Cai , Longbo Huang , Jian Li

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has emerged as a powerful approach for aligning generative models, but its reliance on learned reward models makes it vulnerable to mis-specification and reward hacking. Preference-based…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-23 Akhil Agnihotri , Rahul Jain , Deepak Ramachandran , Zheng Wen

In the same way that generative models today conduct most of their training in a self-supervised fashion, how can agentic models conduct their training in a self-supervised fashion, interactively exploring, learning, and preparing to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Kathryn Wantlin , Chongyi Zheng , Benjamin Eysenbach

Exploration is an essential component of reinforcement learning algorithms, where agents need to learn how to predict and control unknown and often stochastic environments. Reinforcement learning agents depend crucially on exploration to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-03 Susan Amin , Maziar Gomrokchi , Harsh Satija , Herke van Hoof , Doina Precup

While in general trading off exploration and exploitation in reinforcement learning is hard, under some formulations relatively simple solutions exist. In this paper, we first derive upper bounds for the utility of selecting different…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-06-06 Christos Dimitrakakis

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

Safety is one of the main challenges in applying reinforcement learning to realistic environmental tasks. To ensure safety during and after training process, existing methods tend to adopt overly conservative policy to avoid unsafe…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-27 Xiao Zhang , Hai Zhang , Hongtu Zhou , Chang Huang , Di Zhang , Chen Ye , Junqiao Zhao

This paper reviews exploration techniques in deep reinforcement learning. Exploration techniques are of primary importance when solving sparse reward problems. In sparse reward problems, the reward is rare, which means that the agent will…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-03 Pawel Ladosz , Lilian Weng , Minwoo Kim , Hyondong Oh

Model-free reinforcement learning methods such as the Proximal Policy Optimization algorithm (PPO) have successfully applied in complex decision-making problems such as Atari games. However, these methods suffer from high variances and high…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-11-20 Feiyang Pan , Qingpeng Cai , An-Xiang Zeng , Chun-Xiang Pan , Qing Da , Hualin He , Qing He , Pingzhong Tang

Being able to explore unknown environments is a requirement for fully autonomous robots. Many learning-based methods have been proposed to learn an exploration strategy. In the frontier-based exploration, learning algorithms tend to learn…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-06-18 Zhaoting Li , Tingguang Li , Jiankun Wang , Max Q. -H. Meng

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

Unsupervised reinforcement learning (RL) aims at pre-training agents that can solve a wide range of downstream tasks in complex environments. Despite recent advancements, existing approaches suffer from several limitations: they may require…

A central challenge in reinforcement learning is discovering effective policies for tasks where rewards are sparsely distributed. We postulate that in the absence of useful reward signals, an effective exploration strategy should seek out…

Exploration algorithms for reinforcement learning typically replace or augment the reward function with an additional ``intrinsic'' reward that trains the agent to seek previously unseen states of the environment. Here, we consider an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Kevin McKee , Eric Alt , Andrew Grebenisan , Mick van Gelderen , Gary Miguel

Language model alignment (or, reinforcement learning) techniques that leverage active exploration -- deliberately encouraging the model to produce diverse, informative responses -- offer the promise of super-human capabilities. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-17 Dylan J. Foster , Zakaria Mhammedi , Dhruv Rohatgi

In the face of difficult exploration problems in reinforcement learning, we study whether giving an agent an object-centric mapping (describing a set of items and their attributes) allow for more efficient learning. We found this problem is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-15 Anthony GX-Chen , Kenneth Marino , Rob Fergus

Exploration is essential in reinforcement learning as an agent relies on trial and error to learn an optimal policy. However, when rewards are sparse, naive exploration strategies, like noise injection, are often insufficient. Intrinsic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-30 Minjae Cho , Huy Trong Tran

Model-based reinforcement learning approaches leverage a forward dynamics model to support planning and decision making, which, however, may fail catastrophically if the model is inaccurate. Although there are several existing methods…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-09-30 Hang Lai , Jian Shen , Weinan Zhang , Yong Yu

Reward-free reinforcement learning (RF-RL), a recently introduced RL paradigm, relies on random action-taking to explore the unknown environment without any reward feedback information. While the primary goal of the exploration phase in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-23 Ruiquan Huang , Jing Yang , Yingbin Liang