Exploration Behavior of Untrained Policies

Fuente: arXiv
Salvato in:
Dettagli Bibliografici
Autore principale: Adamczyk, Jacob
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
Soggetti:
Accesso online:
Tags: Aggiungi Tag
Nessun Tag, puoi essere il primo ad aggiungerne!!
_version_ 1866912500043218944
author Adamczyk, Jacob
author_facet Adamczyk, Jacob
contents Exploration remains a fundamental challenge in reinforcement learning (RL), particularly in environments with sparse or adversarial reward structures. In this work, we study how the architecture of deep neural policies implicitly shapes exploration before training. We theoretically and empirically demonstrate strategies for generating ballistic or diffusive trajectories from untrained policies in a toy model. Using the theory of infinite-width networks and a continuous-time limit, we show that untrained policies return correlated actions and result in non-trivial state-visitation distributions. We discuss the distributions of the corresponding trajectories for a standard architecture, revealing insights into inductive biases for tackling exploration. Our results establish a theoretical and experimental framework for using policy initialization as a design tool to understand exploration behavior in early training.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_22566
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Exploration Behavior of Untrained Policies
Adamczyk, Jacob
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Exploration remains a fundamental challenge in reinforcement learning (RL), particularly in environments with sparse or adversarial reward structures. In this work, we study how the architecture of deep neural policies implicitly shapes exploration before training. We theoretically and empirically demonstrate strategies for generating ballistic or diffusive trajectories from untrained policies in a toy model. Using the theory of infinite-width networks and a continuous-time limit, we show that untrained policies return correlated actions and result in non-trivial state-visitation distributions. We discuss the distributions of the corresponding trajectories for a standard architecture, revealing insights into inductive biases for tackling exploration. Our results establish a theoretical and experimental framework for using policy initialization as a design tool to understand exploration behavior in early training.
title Exploration Behavior of Untrained Policies
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.22566