Related papers: Not all uncertainty is alike: volatility, stochast…

Consider the problem of exploration in sparse-reward or reward-free environments, such as in Montezuma's Revenge. In the curiosity-driven paradigm, the agent is rewarded for how much each realized outcome differs from their predicted…

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…

Exploration is one of the core challenges in reinforcement learning. A common formulation of curiosity-driven exploration uses the difference between the real future and the future predicted by a learned model. However, predicting the…

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 study dynamic allocation problems for discrete time multi-armed bandits under uncertainty, based on the the theory of nonlinear expectations. We show that, under strong independence of the bandits and with some relaxation in the…

The main objective of this paper is to outline a theoretical framework to analyse how humans' decision-making strategies under uncertainty manage the trade-off between information gathering (exploration) and reward seeking (exploitation). A…

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"…

In Reinforcement Learning, agents learn policies by exploring and interacting with the environment. Due to the curse of dimensionality, learning policies that map high-dimensional sensory input to motor output is particularly challenging.…

A recent body of work addresses safety constraints in explore-and-exploit systems. Such constraints arise where, for example, exploration is carried out by individuals whose welfare should be balanced with overall welfare. In this paper, we…

In many learning based control methodologies, learning the unknown dynamic model precedes the control phase, while the aim is to control the system such that it remains in some safe region of the state space. In this work, our aim is to…

We identify a distinct motive for search, termed catalytic exploration, where agents rationally explore alternatives they expect to reject to resolve uncertainty about the status quo. By decomposing option value into switching and catalytic…

Noise threads every scale of the natural world. Once dismissed as mere background hiss, it is now recognized as both a currency of information and a source of order in systems driven far from equilibrium. From nanometer-scale motor proteins…

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,…

Exploration in environments with sparse rewards is difficult for artificial agents. Curiosity driven learning -- using feed-forward prediction errors as intrinsic rewards -- has achieved some success in these scenarios, but fails when faced…

Noise, through its interaction with the nonlinearity of the living systems, can give rise to counter-intuitive phenomena such as stochastic resonance, noise-delayed extinction, temporal oscillations, and spatial patterns. In this paper we…

Navigating toward a known target in a noisy environment is a fundamental problem shared across biological, physical, and engineered systems. Although optimal strategies are often framed in terms of continuous, fine-grained feedback, we show…

Learning and decision-making in domains with naturally high noise-to-signal ratio, such as Finance or Healthcare, is often challenging, while the stakes are very high. In this paper, we study the problem of learning and acting under a…

We can overcome uncertainty with uncertainty. Using randomness in our choices and in what we control, and hence in the decision making process, could potentially offset the uncertainty inherent in the environment and yield better outcomes.…

When searching for policies, reward-sparse environments often lack sufficient information about which behaviors to improve upon or avoid. In such environments, the policy search process is bound to blindly search for reward-yielding…

Exploration is a significant challenge in practical reinforcement learning (RL), and uncertainty-aware exploration that incorporates the quantification of epistemic and aleatory uncertainty has been recognized as an effective exploration…