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Achieving efficient and scalable exploration in complex domains poses a major challenge in reinforcement learning. While Bayesian and PAC-MDP approaches to the exploration problem offer strong formal guarantees, they are often impractical…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2015-11-23 Bradly C. Stadie , Sergey Levine , Pieter Abbeel

High sample complexity remains a barrier to the application of reinforcement learning (RL), particularly in multi-agent systems. A large body of work has demonstrated that exploration mechanisms based on the principle of optimism under…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-08-02 Robert Loftin , Aadirupa Saha , Sam Devlin , Katja Hofmann

Language models can learn a range of capabilities from unsupervised training on text corpora. However, to solve a particular problem (such as text summarization) it is typically necessary to fine-tune them on a task-specific dataset. It is…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-03-16 Adam Gleave , Geoffrey Irving

In online reinforcement learning (RL), efficient exploration remains particularly challenging in high-dimensional environments with sparse rewards. In low-dimensional environments, where tabular parameterization is possible, count-based…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-21 Tianjun Zhang , Paria Rashidinejad , Jiantao Jiao , Yuandong Tian , Joseph Gonzalez , Stuart Russell

We introduce Random Reward Perturbation (RRP), a novel exploration strategy for reinforcement learning (RL). Our theoretical analyses demonstrate that adding zero-mean noise to environmental rewards effectively enhances policy diversity…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-11 Haozhe Ma , Guoji Fu , Zhengding Luo , Jiele Wu , Tze-Yun Leong

Modern reinforcement learning (RL) struggles to capture real-world cause-and-effect dynamics, leading to inefficient exploration due to extensive trial-and-error actions. While recent efforts to improve agent exploration have leveraged…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-18 Minh Hoang Nguyen , Hung Le , Svetha Venkatesh

Intrinsic motivation enables reinforcement learning (RL) agents to explore when rewards are very sparse, where traditional exploration heuristics such as Boltzmann or e-greedy would typically fail. However, intrinsic exploration is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-04-07 Philippe Morere , Fabio Ramos

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) shows promise of applying RL to real-world problems by effectively utilizing previously collected data. Most existing offline RL algorithms use regularization or constraints to suppress extrapolation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-20 Xiaoteng Ma , Yiqin Yang , Hao Hu , Qihan Liu , Jun Yang , Chongjie Zhang , Qianchuan Zhao , Bin Liang

This paper provides an empirical evaluation of recently developed exploration algorithms within the Arcade Learning Environment (ALE). We study the use of different reward bonuses that incentives exploration in reinforcement learning. We do…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-28 Adrien Ali Taïga , William Fedus , Marlos C. Machado , Aaron Courville , Marc G. Bellemare

We introduce an exploration bonus for deep reinforcement learning methods that is easy to implement and adds minimal overhead to the computation performed. The bonus is the error of a neural network predicting features of the observations…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-10-31 Yuri Burda , Harrison Edwards , Amos Storkey , Oleg Klimov

Reinforcement learning (RL) agents improve through trial-and-error, but when reward is sparse and the agent cannot discover successful action sequences, learning stagnates. This has been a notable problem in training deep RL agents to…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-02-27 Evan Zheran Liu , Kelvin Guu , Panupong Pasupat , Tianlin Shi , Percy Liang

Recent advancements in deep reinforcement learning (RL) have demonstrated notable progress in sample efficiency, spanning both model-based and model-free paradigms. Despite the identification and mitigation of specific bottlenecks in prior…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-02 Yibo Wang , Jiang Zhao

Numerous heuristics and advanced approaches have been proposed for exploration in different settings for deep reinforcement learning. Noise-based exploration generally fares well with dense-shaped rewards and bonus-based exploration with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-22 Sebastian Griesbach , Carlo D'Eramo

Exploration is essential for reinforcement learning (RL). To face the challenges of exploration, we consider a reward-free RL framework that completely separates exploration from exploitation and brings new challenges for exploration…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-11 Chuheng Zhang , Yuanying Cai , Longbo Huang , Jian Li

Exploration is essential in reinforcement learning, particularly in environments where external rewards are sparse. Here we focus on exploration with intrinsic rewards, where the agent transiently augments the external rewards with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-26 Changmin Yu , Neil Burgess , Maneesh Sahani , Samuel J. Gershman

Continuous control Deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) approaches are known to suffer from estimation biases, leading to suboptimal policies. This paper introduces innovative methods in RL, focusing on addressing and exploiting estimation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-14 Niccolò Turcato , Alberto Sinigaglia , Alberto Dalla Libera , Ruggero Carli , Gian Antonio Susto

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-11 Akshay Mete , Shahid Aamir Sheikh , Tzu-Hsiang Lin , Dileep Kalathil , P. R. Kumar

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-20 Zhaohan Daniel Guo , Emma Brunskill

In recent years, a number of reinforcement learning (RL) methods have been proposed to explore complex environments which differ across episodes. In this work, we show that the effectiveness of these methods critically relies on a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-06 Mikael Henaff , Roberta Raileanu , Minqi Jiang , Tim Rocktäschel

Exploration is essential for general-purpose robotic learning, especially in open-ended environments where dense rewards, explicit goals, or task-specific supervision are scarce. Vision-language models (VLMs), with their semantic reasoning…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-09-12 Seungjae Lee , Daniel Ekpo , Haowen Liu , Furong Huang , Abhinav Shrivastava , Jia-Bin Huang