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Search-augmented large language models (LLMs) trained with reinforcement learning (RL) have achieved strong results on open-domain question answering (QA), but training still remains a significant challenge. The optimization is often…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-25 Yutao Xie , Nathaniel Thomas , Nicklas Hansen , Yang Fu , Li Erran Li , Xiaolong Wang

The infamous exploration-exploitation dilemma is one of the oldest and most important problems in reinforcement learning (RL). Deliberate and effective exploration is necessary for RL agents to succeed in most environments. However, until…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-10-09 Suraj Narayanan Sasikumar

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 is widely regarded as one of the most challenging aspects of reinforcement learning (RL), with many naive approaches succumbing to exponential sample complexity. To isolate the challenges of exploration, we propose a new…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-10 Chi Jin , Akshay Krishnamurthy , Max Simchowitz , Tiancheng Yu

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…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-06 Ifdita Hasan Orney , Jubayer Ibn Hamid , Shreya S Ramanujam , Shirley Wu , Hengyuan Hu , Noah Goodman , Dorsa Sadigh , Chelsea Finn

Reinforcement learning (RL) promises to expand the capabilities of language models, but it is unclear if current RL techniques promote the discovery of novel behaviors, or simply sharpen those already present in the base model. In this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Jens Tuyls , Dylan J. Foster , Akshay Krishnamurthy , Jordan T. Ash

Recent studies have demonstrated the effectiveness of LLM test-time scaling. However, existing approaches to incentivize LLMs' deep thinking abilities generally require large-scale data or significant training efforts. Meanwhile, it remains…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-19 Ruotian Ma , Peisong Wang , Cheng Liu , Xingyan Liu , Jiaqi Chen , Bang Zhang , Xin Zhou , Nan Du , Jia Li

In continuous control, exploration is often performed through undirected strategies in which parameters of the networks or selected actions are perturbed by random noise. Although the deep setting of undirected exploration has been shown to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-04 Baturay Saglam , Suleyman S. Kozat

Safe exploration aims at addressing the limitations of Reinforcement Learning (RL) in safety-critical scenarios, where failures during trial-and-error learning may incur high costs. Several methods exist to incorporate external knowledge or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-13 Xiaotong Ji , Antonio Filieri

Large language models (LLMs) have exhibited remarkable capabilities in learning from explanations in prompts, but there has been limited understanding of exactly how these explanations function or why they are effective. This work aims to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-06-14 Xi Ye , Srinivasan Iyer , Asli Celikyilmaz , Ves Stoyanov , Greg Durrett , Ramakanth Pasunuru

In this paper we consider the problem of how a reinforcement learning agent that is tasked with solving a sequence of reinforcement learning problems (a sequence of Markov decision processes) can use knowledge acquired early in its lifetime…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-02-05 Francisco M. Garcia , Philip S. Thomas

Exploration in multi-task reinforcement learning is critical in training agents to deduce the underlying MDP. Many of the existing exploration frameworks such as $E^3$, $R_{max}$, Thompson sampling assume a single stationary MDP and are not…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2016-12-04 Sai Praveen Bangaru , JS Suhas , Balaraman Ravindran

Unsupervised Reinforcement Learning (RL) aims to discover diverse behaviors that can accelerate the learning of downstream tasks. Previous methods typically focus on entropy-based exploration or empowerment-driven skill learning. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-18 Ting Xiao , Jiakun Zheng , Rushuai Yang , Kang Xu , Qiaosheng Zhang , Peng Liu , Chenjia Bai

A major challenge in reinforcement learning is exploration, when local dithering methods such as epsilon-greedy sampling are insufficient to solve a given task. Many recent methods have proposed to intrinsically motivate an agent to seek…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-15 Riley Simmons-Edler , Ben Eisner , Daniel Yang , Anthony Bisulco , Eric Mitchell , Sebastian Seung , Daniel Lee

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

Effective and intelligent exploration has been an unresolved problem for reinforcement learning. Most contemporary reinforcement learning relies on simple heuristic strategies such as $\epsilon$-greedy exploration or adding Gaussian noise…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-19 Muhammad Usama , Dong Eui Chang

Ensuring sufficient exploration is a central challenge when training meta-reinforcement learning (meta-RL) agents to solve novel environments. Conventional solutions to the exploration-exploitation dilemma inject explicit incentives such as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-05 Micah Rentschler , Jesse Roberts

Reinforcement learning (RL) agents are particularly hard to train when rewards are sparse. One common solution is to use intrinsic rewards to encourage agents to explore their environment. However, recent intrinsic exploration methods often…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-23 Jesse Mu , Victor Zhong , Roberta Raileanu , Minqi Jiang , Noah Goodman , Tim Rocktäschel , Edward Grefenstette

Sparsity of rewards while applying a deep reinforcement learning method negatively affects its sample-efficiency. A viable solution to deal with the sparsity of rewards is to learn via intrinsic motivation which advocates for adding an…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-02-22 Jiong Li , Pratik Gajane

This paper presents a novel form of policy gradient for model-free reinforcement learning (RL) with improved exploration properties. Current policy-based methods use entropy regularization to encourage undirected exploration of the reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-03-17 Ofir Nachum , Mohammad Norouzi , Dale Schuurmans