Related papers: SuS: Strategy-aware Surprise for Intrinsic Explora…
The performance of Recommender Systems (RS) varies significantly across users, yet the underlying reasons for this variance remain poorly understood. This paper introduces a unified framework to analyze and explain this performance gap by…
Efficient exploration is a long-standing problem in reinforcement learning since extrinsic rewards are usually sparse or missing. A popular solution to this issue is to feed an agent with novelty signals as intrinsic rewards. In this work,…
The human intrinsic desire to pursue knowledge, also known as curiosity, is considered essential in the process of skill acquisition. With the aid of artificial curiosity, we could equip current techniques for control, such as Reinforcement…
Reinforcement learning involves agents interacting with an environment to complete tasks. When rewards provided by the environment are sparse, agents may not receive immediate feedback on the quality of actions that they take, thereby…
We present a modular approach to reinforcement learning that uses a Bayesian representation of the uncertainty over models. The approach, BOSS (Best of Sampled Set), drives exploration by sampling multiple models from the posterior and…
Surprise-based learning allows agents to rapidly adapt to non-stationary stochastic environments characterized by sudden changes. We show that exact Bayesian inference in a hierarchical model gives rise to a surprise-modulated trade-off…
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,…
An effective approach to exploration in reinforcement learning is to rely on an agent's uncertainty over the optimal policy, which can yield near-optimal exploration strategies in tabular settings. However, in non-tabular settings that…
We introduce a new unsupervised pretraining objective for reinforcement learning. During the unsupervised reward-free pretraining phase, the agent maximizes mutual information between tasks and states induced by the policy. Our key…
Decisions made by machine learning systems have increasing influence on the world, yet it is common for machine learning algorithms to assume that no such influence exists. An example is the use of the i.i.d. assumption in content…
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…
Effective exploration is critical for reinforcement learning agents in environments with sparse rewards or high-dimensional state-action spaces. Recent works based on state-visitation counts, curiosity and entropy-maximization generate…
Autonomous exploration in complex multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) with sparse rewards critically depends on providing agents with effective intrinsic motivation. While artificial curiosity offers a powerful self-supervised signal,…
We introduce Self-supervised Online Reward Shaping (SORS), which aims to improve the sample efficiency of any RL algorithm in sparse-reward environments by automatically densifying rewards. The proposed framework alternates between…
We introduce Sophisticated Learning (SL), a planning-to-learn algorithm that embeds active parameter learning inside the Sophisticated Inference (SI) tree-search framework of Active Inference. Unlike SI -- which optimizes beliefs about…
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"…
Reinforcement learning has been shown to be highly successful at many challenging tasks. However, success heavily relies on well-shaped rewards. Intrinsically motivated RL attempts to remove this constraint by defining an intrinsic reward…
Inspired by the notion of surprise for unconventional discovery we introduce a general search algorithm we name surprise search as a new method of evolutionary divergent search. Surprise search is grounded in the divergent search paradigm…
In vision-based reinforcement learning (RL) tasks, it is prevalent to assign auxiliary tasks with a surrogate self-supervised loss so as to obtain more semantic representations and improve sample efficiency. However, abundant information in…
Standard selective prediction methods typically estimate uncertainty from the output of a single predictive branch. While effective for general uncertainty estimation, these approaches often struggle under partial observability, where local…