Effective and intelligent exploration has been an unresolved problem for reinforcement learning. Most contemporary reinforcement learning relies on simple heuristic strategies such as -greedy exploration or adding Gaussian noise to actions. These heuristics, however, are unable to intelligently distinguish the well …
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48 results for “state space exploration”
This work improves policy optimization by maximizing entropy of state distribution, leading to better exploration.
problem Lack of exploration in state space when maximizing policy entropy.
method Proposes maximizing the entropy of a lower bound approximation to the state weighting distribution, based on latent space representation.
result Entropy regularization based on marginal state distribution achieves superior state space coverage and better performance in various domains.
Exploration is an extremely challenging problem in reinforcement learning, especially in high dimensional state and action spaces and when only sparse rewards are available. Effective representations can indicate which components of the state are task relevant and thus reduce the dimensionality of the space to explore.…
HyperX uses reward bonuses to enable efficient exploration in meta-learning.
problem Catastrophic failure of meta-learning with sparse rewards.
method HyperX uses novel reward bonuses to explore in approximate hyper-state space.
result HyperX meta-learns better task-exploration and adapts more successfully to new tasks.
New RL algorithm for large state spaces with explicit exploration and exploitation phases.
problem Reinforcement learning in large or infinite state spaces.
method Model-based approach with explicit exploration and exploitation phases.
result Proves near-optimal policy with polynomial sample complexity under certain assumptions.
HOMER learns latent states to explore rich environments efficiently.
problem Exploration in rich observation environments with unknown latent states.
method Interleaves representation learning and strategic exploration to identify kinematic states.
result Provably efficient exploration with polynomial sample complexity in latent states and time horizon.
Bayesian method improves reinforcement learning efficiency by encouraging exploration.
problem High sample complexity due to inefficient exploration.
method Bayesian linear regression and latent space embedding for intrinsic reward.
result Significant improvement in sample complexity on various tasks.
A new active learning method for Gaussian process models.
problem Efficiently exploring unbounded state spaces for accurate models.
method Maximizes mutual information with respect to a bounded region using model predictive control.
result Our method yields a better model within the region of interest than entropy-based methods.
New method uses entropy to improve policy gradient exploration.
problem Limited exploration in policy gradient methods.
method Entropy regularization with discounted future state distribution.
result Proves convergence to locally optimal policy.
Kernel-UCBVI algorithm balances exploration and exploitation in metric state-action spaces.
problem Exploration-exploitation dilemma in finite-horizon reinforcement learning with metric state-action spaces.
method Kernel-UCBVI, leveraging smoothness and kernel estimators of rewards and transitions.
result First regret bound for kernel-based RL using smoothing kernels, .
New findings on when to use action space exploration in reinforcement learning.
problem Understanding when to use action space exploration over traditional methods.
method Theoretical analysis and empirical testing of simple exploration methods.
result Exploration in action space is preferred when parametric complexity exceeds action space dimensionality and horizon length.
Hill-ADAM optimizes loss landscapes by exploring state space deterministically.
problem Escaping local minima in loss landscapes.
method Hill-ADAM alternates between minimizing and maximizing error to explore the loss space.
result Hill-ADAM finds the global minimum state in loss landscapes.
RECODE uses clustering and embedding to track state visitation counts in RL.
problem Efficient novelty-based exploration in nonstationary RL environments.
method Non-parametric clustering, online density estimation, inverse dynamics loss.
result RECODE achieves state-of-the-art performance in challenging RL tasks.
A central challenge in reinforcement learning is discovering effective policies for tasks where rewards are sparsely distributed. We postulate that in the absence of useful reward signals, an effective exploration strategy should seek out {\it decision states}. These states lie at critical junctions in the state space …
Proposes a method to avoid excessive exploration in reinforcement learning.
problem Avoiding excessive exploration in reinforcement learning to deploy it in practice.
method Designs a novel algorithm using UCB reinforcement learning policy with adaptive exploration constraints.
result Proves that the approach remains conservative while minimizing regret in tabular settings and validates on real-world tasks.
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 methods or -greedy in Q-learning. While these methods are appealing due to their…
Scalable and effective exploration remains a key challenge in reinforcement learning (RL). While there are methods with optimality guarantees in the setting of discrete state and action spaces, these methods cannot be applied in high-dimensional deep RL scenarios. As such, most contemporary RL relies on simple heuristi…
Develops a learning model predictive controller for competitive racing.
problem Lack of exploration in state space and complexity in obstacle avoidance.
method Explores state space through multiple initializations and develops a new method for convex terminal set selection.
result Yields a richer terminal safe set and maintains convexity.
ACE improves GFlowNet exploration efficiency by balancing complementary search strategies.
problem Efficient exploration of diverse high-probability regions in GFlowNets.
method Adaptive Complementary Exploration (ACE) trains a separate GFlowNet to search underexplored regions.
result Significantly improves approximation accuracy and diverse state discovery.
Real-world applications require RL algorithms to act safely. During learning process, it is likely that the agent executes sub-optimal actions that may lead to unsafe/poor states of the system. Exploration is particularly brittle in high-dimensional state/action space due to increased number of low-performing actions. …
Dynamical systems with large state-spaces are often expensive to thoroughly explore experimentally. Coarse-graining methods aim to define simpler systems which are more amenable to analysis and exploration; most current methods, however, focus on a priori state aggregation based on similarities in transition rates, whi…
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 in higher dimensions due to their reliance on enumerating the state-action space.…
Exploration strategy design is one of the challenging problems in reinforcement learning~(RL), especially when the environment contains a large state space or sparse rewards. During exploration, the agent tries to discover novel areas or high reward~(quality) areas. In most existing methods, the novelty and quality in …
This paper proposes a method to safely adjust exploration in RL to satisfy constraints.
problem Unsafe exploration in reinforcement learning violates constraints on controlled object states.
method Automatic adjustment of exploration inputs and variance-covariance matrix for safety.
result The method guarantees satisfaction of joint chance constraints with specified probability.
Reinforcement learning algorithms struggle when the reward signal is very sparse. In these cases, naive random exploration methods essentially rely on a random walk to stumble onto a rewarding state. Recent works utilize intrinsic motivation to guide the exploration via generative models, predictive forward models, or …
We consider the generic approach of using an experience memory to help exploration by adapting a restart distribution. That is, given the capacity to reset the state with those corresponding to the agent's past observations, we help exploration by promoting faster state-space coverage via restarting the agent from a mo…
Paper tackles efficient exploration of unseen graph-structured environments.
problem Efficient exploration of unseen graph-structured environments.
method Learning to explore framework using reinforcement learning and graph-structured memory.
result Approach outperforms hand-engineered methods in software testing and real-world applications.
Generically learns movement control policies from exploration data.
problem Movement optimization in physically based characters.
method Parameterizes actions as target states, learns low-level control policy.
result Improves movement optimization across multiple tasks and algorithms.
This paper investigates the effectiveness of adversarial training in enhancing the robustness of Deep Q-Network (DQN) policies to state-space perturbations. We first present a formal analysis of adversarial training in DQN agents and its performance with respect to the proportion of adversarial perturbations to nominal…
SPAQL improves RL by adaptively partitioning state-action space and learning a time-invariant policy.
problem Efficient model-free reinforcement learning with scalable algorithms.
method Adaptive Q-learning with UCB and Boltzmann exploration, automatically tuning temperature.
result SPAQL converges faster and uses fewer resources than AQL, showing higher sample efficiency.
Improved RL algorithm reduces regret in large state spaces.
problem Exploration in large or continuous state spaces.
method Optimistically-initialized randomized least-squares value iteration (RLSVI) with function approximation.
result Frequentist regret bound of for low-rank transition dynamics.
Bonsai-Net efficiently discovers state-of-the-art models with fewer parameters.
problem Efficiently discovering state-of-the-art neural architectures with minimal computational expense.
method Bonsai-Net uses a modified differential pruner to explore a relaxed search space.
result Bonsai-Net consistently discovers better architectures than random search with fewer parameters.
We address reinforcement learning problems with finite state and action spaces where the underlying MDP has some known structure that could be potentially exploited to minimize the exploration rates of suboptimal (state, action) pairs. For any arbitrary structure, we derive problem-specific regret lower bounds satisfie…
EBMs improve sample efficiency and generalization in RL.
problem Improving sample efficiency and generalization in reinforcement learning.
method Developed an online algorithm to train EBMs for model-based planning, leveraging their ability to infer intermediate states.
result EBMs lead to significantly better online learning and state space planning compared to feed-forward networks.
We introduce and analyse two algorithms for exploration-exploitation in discrete and continuous Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) based on exploration bonuses. SCAL is a variant of SCAL (Fruit et al., 2018) that performs efficient exploration-exploitation in any unknown weakly-communicating MDP for which an upper bo…
Optimal control in latent factor models uses Tsallis entropy for exploration.
problem Optimal control in models with latent factors.
method Reward exploration with Tsallis entropy and derive -Gaussian distribution over states.
result Optimal policy derived in a model-agnostic setting.
Paper proposes efficient sample collection strategy for RL.
problem Balancing exploration and exploitation in reinforcement learning.
method Decoupled approach with objective-specific and objective-agnostic strategies.
result Improved or novel sample complexity guarantees for various RL settings.
New RL approach uses future state and action visitation measures for better exploration.
problem Improving exploration in reinforcement learning.
method Intrinsic reward based on future state and action visitation measures, using contraction operators.
result Policies achieve good state-action space coverage and high performance.
Maximizes Rényi entropy for efficient exploration in reward-free RL.
problem Challenges of exploration in reward-free reinforcement learning.
method Maximizes Rényi entropy over state-action space in exploration phase; uses batch RL for planning phase.
result Effective and sample-efficient exploration leading to superior policies.
We study the exploration problem in episodic MDPs with rich observations generated from a small number of latent states. Under certain identifiability assumptions, we demonstrate how to estimate a mapping from the observations to latent states inductively through a sequence of regression and clustering steps -- where p…
Multiagent reinforcement learning algorithms (MARL) have been demonstrated on complex tasks that require the coordination of a team of multiple agents to complete. Existing works have focused on sharing information between agents via centralized critics to stabilize learning or through communication to increase perform…
Efficient Reinforcement Learning usually takes advantage of demonstration or good exploration strategy. By applying posterior sampling in model-free RL under the hypothesis of GP, we propose Gaussian Process Posterior Sampling Reinforcement Learning(GPPSTD) algorithm in continuous state space, giving theoretical justif…
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 their state spaces; however, applying these techniques naively to the multi-age…
A new metric based on hitting probabilities for directed graphs and Markov chains.
problem Lack of metrics specifically adapted to asymmetric structure of directed graphs and Markov chains.
method Metric based on hitting probabilities, insensitive to shortest and average walk distances.
result New structural theory of directed graphs and utility for various applications.
AE-LSVI identifies near-optimal policies in complex systems with minimal data.
problem Identifying near-optimal policies in complex, costly data acquisition systems.
method Combines optimism and pessimism for active exploration in a generative model setting.
result Proves near-optimal policy identification over entire state spaces with polynomial sample complexity.
Bayesian model learns multiscale interactions in complex systems.
problem Understanding dynamic interplay between processes at different time scales.
method Bayesian learning framework with Particle Gibbs with Ancestor Sampling (PGAS) algorithm.
result Demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed approach through simulations.
The paper explores learning good policies from past data in large state spaces.
problem Learning good policies from historical data in large state spaces.
method Introduces expressivity assumptions and data coverage for function approximation and algorithmic design.
result A variety of algorithms and their guarantees are presented based on assumptions and desired complexity.
Revel tackles safe exploration in RL with verified symbolic policies.
problem Computational infeasibility of verifying neural networks in RL learning loops.
method Two policy classes: neurosymbolic with approximate gradients and symbolic policies for efficient verification. Mirror descent over policies to safely update and project policies.
result Revel discovers policies that outperform prior approaches to verified exploration.