MaxInfoRL: Boosting exploration in reinforcement learning through information gain maximization

ICLR 2025 Conference Submission13089 Authors

Keywords: Reinforcement learning, Exploration in off-policy methods, Continuous control

TL;DR: We propose a systematic way of combining directed exploration bonuses with extrinsic task rewards in RL and evaluate it across several continuous and visual control tasks.

Abstract:

Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms aim to balance exploiting the current best strategy with exploring new options that could lead to higher rewards. Most common RL algorithms use undirected exploration, i.e., select random sequences of actions.
Exploration can also be directed using intrinsic rewards, such as curiosity or model epistemic uncertainty. However, effectively balancing task and intrinsic rewards is challenging and often task-dependent. In this work, we introduce a framework, MaxInfoRL, for balancing intrinsic and extrinsic exploration. MaxInfoRL steers exploration towards informative transitions, by maximizing intrinsic rewards such as the information gain about the underlying task.
When combined with Boltzmann exploration, this approach naturally trades off maximization of the value function with that of the entropy over states, rewards, and actions. We show that our approach achieves sublinear regret in the simplified setting of multi-armed bandits. We then apply this general formulation to a variety of off-policy model-free RL methods for continuous state-action spaces, yielding novel algorithms that achieve superior performance across hard exploration problems and complex scenarios such as visual control tasks.

Primary Area: reinforcement learning

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Submission Number: 13089