Related papers: General Exploratory Bonus for Optimistic Explorati…
Exploration in reinforcement learning (RL) remains an open challenge. RL algorithms rely on observing rewards to train the agent, and if informative rewards are sparse the agent learns slowly or may not learn at all. To improve exploration…
Reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF), which learns a reward model from human preference data and then optimizes a policy to favor preferred responses, has emerged as a central paradigm for aligning large language models (LLMs)…
Optimistic value estimates provide one mechanism for directed exploration in reinforcement learning (RL). The agent acts greedily with respect to an estimate of the value plus what can be seen as a value bonus. The value bonus can be…
Efficient exploration remains a central challenge in reinforcement learning (RL), particularly in sparse-reward environments. We introduce Optimistic World Models (OWMs), a principled and scalable framework for optimistic exploration that…
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…
Many reinforcement learning exploration techniques are overly optimistic and try to explore every state. Such exploration is impossible in environments with the unlimited number of states. I propose to use simulated exploration with an…
In this work, we address the challenge of data-efficient exploration in reinforcement learning by examining existing principled, information-theoretic approaches to intrinsic motivation. Specifically, we focus on a class of exploration…
We propose a model-free reinforcement learning algorithm inspired by the popular randomized least squares value iteration (RLSVI) algorithm as well as the optimism principle. Unlike existing upper-confidence-bound (UCB) based approaches,…
Conveying complex objectives to reinforcement learning (RL) agents often requires meticulous reward engineering. Preference-based RL methods are able to learn a more flexible reward model based on human preferences by actively incorporating…
In many real-world applications of reinforcement learning (RL), performing actions requires consuming certain types of resources that are non-replenishable in each episode. Typical applications include robotic control with limited energy…
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…
One principled approach for provably efficient exploration is incorporating the upper confidence bound (UCB) into the value function as a bonus. However, UCB is specified to deal with linear and tabular settings and is incompatible with…
Exploration is a crucial and distinctive aspect of reinforcement learning (RL) that remains a fundamental open problem. Several methods have been proposed to tackle this challenge. Commonly used methods inject random noise directly into the…
Efficient exploration remains a challenging problem in reinforcement learning, especially for those tasks where rewards from environments are sparse. A commonly used approach for exploring such environments is to introduce some "intrinsic"…
Exploration is a cornerstone of learning from experience: it enables agents to find solutions to complex problems, generalize to novel ones, and scale performance with test-time compute. In this paper, we present a framework for…
Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has emerged as a key technique for post-training large language models. Despite its empirical success, the theoretical understanding of RLHF is still limited, as learning the KL-regularized…
Model-based Reinforcement Learning (MBRL) has been widely adapted due to its sample efficiency. However, existing worst-case regret analysis typically requires optimistic planning, which is not realistic in general. In contrast, motivated…
Efficient exploration is necessary to achieve good sample efficiency for reinforcement learning in general. From small, tabular settings such as gridworlds to large, continuous and sparse reward settings such as robotic object manipulation…
Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) is a standard approach for fine-tuning large language models to follow instructions. As part of this process, learned reward models are used to approximately model human preferences.…
While learning in an unknown Markov Decision Process (MDP), an agent should trade off exploration to discover new information about the MDP, and exploitation of the current knowledge to maximize the reward. Although the agent will…