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Related papers: Exploitation Is All You Need... for Exploration

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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

In this work, we take a first step toward elucidating the mechanisms behind emergent exploration in unsupervised reinforcement learning. We study Single-Goal Contrastive Reinforcement Learning (SGCRL), a self-supervised algorithm capable of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-17 Mahsa Bastankhah , Grace Liu , Dilip Arumugam , Thomas L. Griffiths , Benjamin Eysenbach

We study the repeated principal-agent bandit game, where the principal indirectly interacts with the unknown environment by proposing incentives for the agent to play arms. Most existing work assumes the agent has full knowledge of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Junyan Liu , Lillian J. Ratliff

Recent works have proven that intricate cooperative behaviors can emerge in agents trained using meta reinforcement learning on open ended task distributions using self-play. While the results are impressive, we argue that self-play and…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2024-05-08 Richard Bornemann , Gautier Hamon , Eleni Nisioti , Clément Moulin-Frier

In reinforcement learning, an agent interacts sequentially with an environment to maximize a reward, receiving only partial, probabilistic feedback. This creates a fundamental exploration-exploitation trade-off: the agent must explore to…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2026-03-27 Josep Lumbreras , Ruo Cheng Huang , Yanglin Hu , Marco Fanizza , Mile Gu

Exploration in sparse reward environments remains one of the key challenges of model-free reinforcement learning. Instead of solely relying on extrinsic rewards provided by the environment, many state-of-the-art methods use intrinsic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-03 Roberta Raileanu , Tim Rocktäschel

Learning complex robot behavior through interactions with the environment necessitates principled exploration. Effective strategies should prioritize exploring regions of the state-action space that maximize rewards, with optimistic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-12 Jasmine Bayrooti , Carl Henrik Ek , Amanda Prorok

Many potential applications of reinforcement learning (RL) are stymied by the large numbers of samples required to learn an effective policy. This is especially true when applying RL to real-world control tasks, e.g. in the sciences or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-11 Viraj Mehta , Ian Char , Joseph Abbate , Rory Conlin , Mark D. Boyer , Stefano Ermon , Jeff Schneider , Willie Neiswanger

Learning in environments with sparse rewards remains a fundamental challenge in reinforcement learning. Artificial curiosity addresses this limitation through intrinsic rewards to guide exploration, however, the precise formulation of these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-20 Alexander Nedergaard , Pablo A. Morales

Exploration is a fundamental aspect of reinforcement learning (RL), and its effectiveness is a deciding factor in the performance of RL algorithms, especially when facing sparse extrinsic rewards. Recent studies have shown the effectiveness…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-19 Shanchuan Wan , Yujin Tang , Yingtao Tian , Tomoyuki Kaneko

State of the art reinforcement learning has enabled training agents on tasks of ever increasing complexity. However, the current paradigm tends to favor training agents from scratch on every new task or on collections of tasks with a view…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-09 Jacob Walker , Eszter Vértes , Yazhe Li , Gabriel Dulac-Arnold , Ankesh Anand , Théophane Weber , Jessica B. Hamrick

Exploration strategy design is one of the challenging problems in reinforcement learning~(RL), especially when the environment contains a large state space or sparse rewards. During exploration, the agent tries to discover novel areas or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-07 Xiao Ma , Shen-Yi Zhao , Wu-Jun Li

The central tenet of reinforcement learning (RL) is that agents seek to maximize the sum of cumulative rewards. In contrast, active inference, an emerging framework within cognitive and computational neuroscience, proposes that agents act…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-02 Alexander Tschantz , Beren Millidge , Anil K. Seth , Christopher L. Buckley

We introduce a class of learning problems where the agent is presented with a series of tasks. Intuitively, if there is relation among those tasks, then the information gained during execution of one task has value for the execution of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-09-06 Christos Dimitrakakis

For decades, the evolution of cooperation has piqued the interest of numerous academic disciplines such as game theory, economics, biology, and computer science. In this work, we demonstrate the emergence of a novel and effective resource…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2023-07-06 Jack Garbus , Jordan Pollack

Intrinsically motivated reinforcement learning aims to address the exploration challenge for sparse-reward tasks. However, the study of exploration methods in transition-dependent multi-agent settings is largely absent from the literature.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-30 Tonghan Wang , Jianhao Wang , Yi Wu , Chongjie Zhang

Solving tasks with sparse rewards is one of the most important challenges in reinforcement learning. In the single-agent setting, this challenge is addressed by introducing intrinsic rewards that motivate agents to explore unseen regions of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-25 Shariq Iqbal , Fei Sha

Exploration is a difficult challenge in reinforcement learning and even recent state-of-the art curiosity-based methods rely on the simple epsilon-greedy strategy to generate novelty. We argue that pure random walks do not succeed to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-07-06 Fabio Pardo , Vitaly Levdik , Petar Kormushev

We study the reward-free reinforcement learning framework, which is particularly suitable for batch reinforcement learning and scenarios where one needs policies for multiple reward functions. This framework has two phases. In the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-26 Zihan Zhang , Simon S. Du , Xiangyang Ji

Empowerment is an information-theoretic method that can be used to intrinsically motivate learning agents. It attempts to maximize an agent's control over the environment by encouraging visiting states with a large number of reachable next…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-09 Felix Leibfried , Sergio Pascual-Diaz , Jordi Grau-Moya
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