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In the era of deep reinforcement learning, making progress is more complex, as the collected experience must be compressed into a deep model for future exploitation and sampling. Many papers have shown that training a deep learning policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-05 Glen Berseth

We address the challenge of exploration in reinforcement learning (RL) when the agent operates in an unknown environment with sparse or no rewards. In this work, we study the maximum entropy exploration problem of two different types. The…

Large Language Models (LLMs) can self-improve through reinforcement learning, where they generate trajectories to explore and discover better solutions. However, this exploration process is computationally expensive, often forcing current…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-01 Ziniu Li , Congliang Chen , Tianyun Yang , Tian Ding , Ruoyu Sun , Ge Zhang , Wenhao Huang , Zhi-Quan Luo

The objective of a reinforcement learning agent is to discover better actions through exploration. However, typical exploration techniques aim to maximize rewards, often incurring high costs in both exploration and learning processes. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-24 Akane Tsuboya , Yu Kono , Tatsuji Takahashi

Balancing exploration and exploitation remains a central challenge in reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) for large language models (LLMs). Current RLVR methods often overemphasize exploitation, leading to entropy…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Liang Chen , Xueting Han , Qizhou Wang , Bo Han , Jing Bai , Hinrich Schutze , Kam-Fai Wong

Exploration in environments with sparse rewards remains a fundamental challenge in reinforcement learning (RL). Existing approaches such as curriculum learning and Go-Explore often rely on hand-crafted heuristics, while curiosity-driven…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Georgios Sotirchos , Zlatan Ajanović , Jens Kober

The question of how to explore, i.e., take actions with uncertain outcomes to learn about possible future rewards, is a key question in reinforcement learning (RL). Here, we show a surprising result: We show that Q-learning with nonlinear…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-05-31 Justas Dauparas , Ryota Tomioka , Katja Hofmann

Our work investigates the economic efficiency of the prevailing "ladder-step" investment strategy in oil and gas exploration, which advocates for the incremental acquisition of geological information throughout the project lifecycle. By…

Exploration is a crucial skill for in-context reinforcement learning in unknown environments. However, it remains unclear if large language models can effectively explore a partially hidden state space. This work isolates exploration as the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-26 Tim Grams , Patrick Betz , Sascha Marton , Stefan Lüdtke , Christian Bartelt

The integration of Reinforcement Learning (RL) into flow matching models for text-to-image (T2I) generation has driven substantial advances in generation quality. However, these gains often come at the cost of exhaustive exploration and…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-18 Xiaolong Fu , Lichen Ma , Zipeng Guo , ShiPing Dong , Lan Yang , Tan Lit Sin , Gaojing Zhou , Yu He , Jingling Fu , Shizhe Zhou , Junshi Huang , Jason Li

Reinforcement learning (RL) has been successfully applied to solve the problem of finding obstacle-free paths for autonomous agents operating in stochastic and uncertain environments. However, when the underlying stochastic dynamics of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-29 Sheryl Paul , Jyotirmoy V. Deshmukh

Self-improvement via RL often fails on complex reasoning tasks because GRPO-style post-training methods rely on the model's initial ability to generate positive samples. Without guided exploration, these approaches merely reinforce what the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-28 Ruiyang Zhou , Shuozhe Li , Amy Zhang , Liu Leqi

Recent advances in large reasoning models have leveraged reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) to improve reasoning capabilities. However, scaling these methods typically requires extensive rollout computation and large…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-03 Xinyu Tang , Zhenduo Zhang , Yurou Liu , Wayne Xin Zhao , Zujie Wen , Zhiqiang Zhang , Jun Zhou

Learning agents that excel at sequential decision-making tasks must continuously resolve the problem of exploration and exploitation for optimal learning. However, such interactions with the environment online might be prohibitively…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-30 Ambedkar Dukkipati , Ranga Shaarad Ayyagari , Bodhisattwa Dasgupta , Parag Dutta , Prabhas Reddy Onteru

Humans learn to play video games significantly faster than the state-of-the-art reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms. People seem to build simple models that are easy to learn to support planning and strategic exploration. Inspired by…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-11-27 Ramtin Keramati , Jay Whang , Patrick Cho , Emma Brunskill

Deep reinforcement learning algorithms require large amounts of experience to learn an individual task. While in principle meta-reinforcement learning (meta-RL) algorithms enable agents to learn new skills from small amounts of experience,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-03-21 Kate Rakelly , Aurick Zhou , Deirdre Quillen , Chelsea Finn , Sergey Levine

Policy tree search is a family of tree search algorithms that use a policy to guide the search. These algorithms provide guarantees on the number of expansions required to solve a given problem that are based on the quality of the policy.…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-03 Jake Tuero , Michael Buro , Levi H. S. Lelis

Deep reinforcement learning has enabled human-level or even super-human performance in various types of games. However, the amount of exploration required for learning is often quite large. Deep reinforcement learning also has super-human…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-14 Akane Minami , Yu Kono , Tatsuji Takahashi

Reinforcement Learning has emerged as a strong alternative to solve optimization tasks efficiently. The use of these algorithms highly depends on the feedback signals provided by the environment in charge of informing about how good (or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-01 Alain Andres , Esther Villar-Rodriguez , Javier Del Ser

Search missions require motion planning and navigation methods for information gathering that continuously replan based on new observations of the robot's surroundings. Current methods for information gathering, such as Monte Carlo Tree…