Related papers: Maximum-Entropy Exploration with Future State-Acti…
We study reward-free and reward-agnostic exploration in episodic finite-horizon Markov decision processes (MDPs), where an agent explores an unknown environment without observing external rewards. Reward-free exploration aims to enable…
The optimal objective is a fundamental aspect of reinforcement learning (RL), as it determines how policies are evaluated and optimized. While total return maximization is the ideal objective in RL, discounted return maximization is the…
The remarkable empirical performance of distributional reinforcement learning (RL) has garnered increasing attention to understanding its theoretical advantages over classical RL. By decomposing the categorical distributional loss commonly…
All reinforcement learning algorithms must handle the trade-off between exploration and exploitation. Many state-of-the-art deep reinforcement learning methods use noise in the action selection, such as Gaussian noise in policy gradient…
The problem of pure exploration in Markov decision processes has been cast as maximizing the entropy over the state distribution induced by the agent's policy, an objective that has been extensively studied. However, little attention has…
This paper explores an intrinsic motivation for mutual awareness, hypothesizing that humans possess a fundamental drive to understand and to be understood even in the absence of extrinsic rewards. Through simulations of the perceptual…
In this paper we address the challenge of exploration in deep reinforcement learning for robotic manipulation tasks. In sparse goal settings, an agent does not receive any positive feedback until randomly achieving the goal, which becomes…
In this paper, we study the optimal stopping problem in the so-called exploratory framework, in which the agent takes actions randomly conditioning on current state and an entropy-regularized term is added to the reward functional. Such a…
We present a new computing model for intrinsic rewards in reinforcement learning that addresses the limitations of existing surprise-driven explorations. The reward is the novelty of the surprise rather than the surprise norm. We estimate…
Intrinsic rewards can improve exploration in reinforcement learning, but the exploration process may suffer from instability caused by non-stationary reward shaping and strong dependency on hyperparameters. In this work, we introduce…
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…
Suppose an agent is in a (possibly unknown) Markov Decision Process in the absence of a reward signal, what might we hope that an agent can efficiently learn to do? This work studies a broad class of objectives that are defined solely as…
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…
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…
Policy entropy has emerged as a fundamental measure for understanding and controlling exploration in reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) for LLMs. However, existing entropy-aware methods mainly regulate entropy through…
We study the problem of reinforcement learning in infinite-horizon discounted linear Markov decision processes (MDPs), and propose the first computationally efficient algorithm achieving rate-optimal regret guarantees in this setting. Our…
In reinforcement learning (RL), the ability to utilize prior knowledge from previously solved tasks can allow agents to quickly solve new problems. In some cases, these new problems may be approximately solved by composing the solutions of…
Achieving effective test-time scaling requires models to engage in In-Context Exploration -- the intrinsic ability to generate, verify, and refine multiple reasoning hypotheses within a single continuous context. Grounded in State Coverage…
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…
We introduce the "inverse bandit" problem of estimating the rewards of a multi-armed bandit instance from observing the learning process of a low-regret demonstrator. Existing approaches to the related problem of inverse reinforcement…