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

200 papers

Reinforcement learning algorithms typically struggle in the absence of a dense, well-shaped reward function. Intrinsically motivated exploration methods address this limitation by rewarding agents for visiting novel states or transitions,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-18 Yuqing Du , Olivia Watkins , Zihan Wang , Cédric Colas , Trevor Darrell , Pieter Abbeel , Abhishek Gupta , Jacob Andreas

Reinforcement learning can greatly benefit from the use of options as a way of encoding recurring behaviours and to foster exploration. An important open problem is how can an agent autonomously learn useful options when solving particular…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-07 Manuel Del Verme , Bruno Castro da Silva , Gianluca Baldassarre

We consider reinforcement learning (RL) in continuous time and study the problem of achieving the best trade-off between exploration of a black box environment and exploitation of current knowledge. We propose an entropy-regularized reward…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-02-14 Haoran Wang , Thaleia Zariphopoulou , Xunyu Zhou

Efficient exploration is an unsolved problem in Reinforcement Learning which is usually addressed by reactively rewarding the agent for fortuitously encountering novel situations. This paper introduces an efficient active exploration…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-17 Pranav Shyam , Wojciech Jaśkowski , Faustino Gomez

Go-Explore achieved breakthrough performance on challenging reinforcement learning (RL) tasks with sparse rewards. The key insight of Go-Explore was that successful exploration requires an agent to first return to an interesting state…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-14 Zhao Yang , Thomas M. Moerland , Mike Preuss , Aske Plaat

Unambiguous identification of the rewards driving behaviours of entities operating in complex open-ended real-world environments is difficult, partly because goals and associated behaviours emerge endogenously and are dynamically updated as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-03 Richard M. Bailey

The exploration/exploitation (E/E) dilemma arises naturally in many subfields of Science. Multi-armed bandit problems formalize this dilemma in its canonical form. Most current research in this field focuses on generic solutions that can be…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2012-07-24 Francis Maes , Damien Ernst , Louis Wehenkel

Exploration is a difficult challenge in reinforcement learning and is of prime importance in sparse reward environments. However, many of the state of the art deep reinforcement learning algorithms, that rely on epsilon-greedy, fail on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-10-15 Navneet Madhu Kumar

In this work, we ask for and answer what makes classical temporal-difference reinforcement learning with epsilon-greedy strategies cooperative. Cooperating in social dilemma situations is vital for animals, humans, and machines. While…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-22 Wolfram Barfuss , Janusz Meylahn

A major challenge in reinforcement learning is the design of exploration strategies, especially for environments with sparse reward structures and continuous state and action spaces. Intuitively, if the reinforcement signal is very scarce,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-15 Susan Amin , Maziar Gomrokchi , Hossein Aboutalebi , Harsh Satija , Doina Precup

Reinforcement Learning faces an important challenge in partial observable environments that has long-term dependencies. In order to learn in an ambiguous environment, an agent has to keep previous perceptions in a memory. Earlier memory…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-22 Alper Demir

A hallmark of life on Earth is the ability of agents to exert causal power and be drivers of subsequent events. This is key to cognition at all scales. Causal emergence, measuring the degree to which an agent exerts unique predictive power…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Federico Pigozzi , Michael Levin

We address the problem of reinforcement learning in which observations may exhibit an arbitrary form of stochastic dependence on past observations and actions. The task for an agent is to attain the best possible asymptotic reward where the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2007-05-23 Daniil Ryabko , Marcus Hutter

Balancing exploration and exploitation remains a central challenge in reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) for large language models (LLMs). Current RLVR methods often overemphasize exploitation, leading to entropy…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Liang Chen , Xueting Han , Qizhou Wang , Bo Han , Jing Bai , Hinrich Schutze , Kam-Fai Wong

Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents have great successes in solving tasks with large observation and action spaces from limited feedback. Still, training the agents is data-intensive and there are no guarantees that the learned behavior is…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-10-20 Helge Spieker

In the last few years, the research activity around reinforcement learning tasks formulated over environments with sparse rewards has been especially notable. Among the numerous approaches proposed to deal with these hard exploration…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-22 Alain Andres , Esther Villar-Rodriguez , Javier Del Ser

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…

Robotics · Computer Science 2019-03-06 Tao Chen , Saurabh Gupta , Abhinav Gupta

The multi-agent setting is intricate and unpredictable since the behaviors of multiple agents influence one another. To address this environmental uncertainty, distributional reinforcement learning algorithms that incorporate uncertainty…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-06 Jihwan Oh , Joonkee Kim , Minchan Jeong , Se-Young Yun

Three core tenets of reinforcement learning (RL)--concerning the definition of agency, the objective of learning, and the scope of the reward hypothesis--have been highlighted as key targets for conceptual revision, with major implications…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-07-30 Mani Hamidi , Terrence W. Deacon

In many real-world scenarios, rewards extrinsic to the agent are extremely sparse, or absent altogether. In such cases, curiosity can serve as an intrinsic reward signal to enable the agent to explore its environment and learn skills that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-05-16 Deepak Pathak , Pulkit Agrawal , Alexei A. Efros , Trevor Darrell