English
Related papers

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

200 papers

Sparse reward environments are known to be challenging for reinforcement learning agents. In such environments, efficient and scalable exploration is crucial. Exploration is a means by which an agent gains information about the environment.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-11 Jacob Chmura , Hasham Burhani , Xiao Qi Shi

Exploration efficiency is a challenging problem in multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), as the policy learned by confederate MARL depends on the collaborative approach among multiple agents. Another important problem is the less…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-30 Qisheng Wang , Qichao Wang

What drives exploration? Understanding intrinsic motivation is a long-standing challenge in both cognitive science and artificial intelligence; numerous objectives have been proposed and used to train agents, yet there remains a gap between…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-05-29 Aly Lidayan , Yuqing Du , Eliza Kosoy , Maria Rufova , Pieter Abbeel , Alison Gopnik

Successfully navigating a complex environment to obtain a desired outcome is a difficult task, that up to recently was believed to be capable only by humans. This perception has been broken down over time, especially with the introduction…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-12 Joshua Hare

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has been proven its efficiency in capturing users' dynamic interests in recent literature. However, training a DRL agent is challenging, because of the sparse environment in recommender systems (RS), DRL…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2022-09-20 Xiaocong Chen , Siyu Wang , Lina Yao , Lianyong Qi , Yong Li

Advances in artificial intelligence often stem from the development of new environments that abstract real-world situations into a form where research can be done conveniently. This paper contributes such an environment based on ideas…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-05-16 Michael Bradley Johanson , Edward Hughes , Finbarr Timbers , Joel Z. Leibo

Exogenous MDPs (Exo-MDPs) capture sequential decision-making where uncertainty comes solely from exogenous inputs that evolve independently of the learner's actions. This structure is especially common in operations research applications…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-29 Hao Liang , Jiayu Cheng , Sean R. Sinclair , Yali Du

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

An online labor platform faces an online learning problem in matching workers with jobs and using the performance on these jobs to create better future matches. This learning problem is complicated by the rise of complex tasks on these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-10-16 Ramesh Johari , Vijay Kamble , Anilesh K. Krishnaswamy , Hannah Li

Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents often struggle with inefficient exploration, particularly in environments with sparse rewards. Traditional exploration strategies can lead to slow learning and suboptimal performance because agents fail to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Gaurav Chaudhary , Laxmidhar Behera , Washim Uddin Mondal

In the era of deep reinforcement learning, making progress is more complex, as the collected experience must be compressed into a deep model for future exploitation and sampling. Many papers have shown that training a deep learning policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-05 Glen Berseth

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become essential to the post-training of large language models (LLMs) for reasoning, agentic capabilities and alignment. Successful RL relies on sufficient exploration of diverse actions by the model during…

Large Language Model (LLM) agents have demonstrated remarkable proficiency in learned tasks, yet they often struggle to adapt to non-stationary environments with feedback. While In-Context Learning and external memory offer some…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-05 Lu Yang , Zelai Xu , Minyang Xie , Jiaxuan Gao , Zhao Shok , Yu Wang , Yi Wu

In environments with sparse or delayed rewards, reinforcement learning (RL) incurs high sample complexity due to the large number of interactions needed for learning. This limitation has motivated the use of large language models (LLMs) for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-23 Narjes Nourzad , Carlee Joe-Wong

Recently, Frazier et al. proposed a natural model for crowdsourced exploration of different a priori unknown options: a principal is interested in the long-term welfare of a population of agents who arrive one by one in a multi-armed bandit…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2015-12-29 Li Han , David Kempe , Ruixin Qiang

A promising technique for exploration is to maximize the entropy of visited state distribution, i.e., state entropy, by encouraging uniform coverage of visited state space. While it has been effective for an unsupervised setup, it tends to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-12 Dongyoung Kim , Jinwoo Shin , Pieter Abbeel , Younggyo Seo

Unlike reinforcement learning (RL) agents, humans remain capable multitaskers in changing environments. In spite of only experiencing the world through their own observations and interactions, people know how to balance focusing on tasks…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-07-02 Rishav Bhagat , Jonathan Balloch , Zhiyu Lin , Julia Kim , Mark Riedl

State-of-the-art reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms typically use random sampling (e.g., $\epsilon$-greedy) for exploration, but this method fails on hard exploration tasks like Montezuma's Revenge. To address the challenge of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-21 Eric Chen , Zhang-Wei Hong , Joni Pajarinen , Pulkit Agrawal

Reinforcement learning is commonly concerned with problems of maximizing accumulated rewards in Markov decision processes. Oftentimes, a certain goal state or a subset of the state space attain maximal reward. In such a case, the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-08-23 Pavel Osinenko , Grigory Yaremenko , Georgiy Malaniya , Anton Bolychev , Alexander Gepperth

Achieving effective test-time scaling requires models to engage in In-Context Exploration -- the intrinsic ability to generate, verify, and refine multiple reasoning hypotheses within a single continuous context. Grounded in State Coverage…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-13 Futing Wang , Jianhao Yan , Yun Luo , Ganqu Cui , Zhi Wang , Xiaoye Qu , Yue Zhang , Yu Cheng , Tao Lin