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arXiv 提交日期: 2026-06-02
📄 Abstract - Using Reward Uncertainty to Induce Diverse Behaviour in Reinforcement Learning

Classical reinforcement learning (RL) typically seeks a deterministic policy that maximizes the expected sum of a scalar reward. Yet, modern applications such as language model fine-tuning or scientific discovery demand diversity. Existing remedies such as entropy regularization or diversity bonuses often require fragile trade-offs that sacrifice performance for stochasticity or rely on heuristic metrics that can misalign policy rankings. We argue that diversity is more naturally understood as the rational response to uncertainty in the reward. When the reward function is not perfectly known--as is the case with ambiguous preferences or imperfect reward models--committing to a single action can be sub-optimal. Building on this, we propose a fundamental reformulation of the RL objective by replacing the scalar reward with a distribution over reward functions, and applying a non-linear objective over sets of actions. The result is a framework in which calibrated behavioural diversity emerges naturally, remains controllable through the reward function distribution, and is obtained without sacrificing expected reward. Focusing on the contextual bandit setting, we derive a principled gradient estimator for this objective and prove that our formulation naturally generalizes both vanilla policy gradient and more recently developed action-set approaches. Our empirical results demonstrate that this framework offers a robust and theoretically grounded alternative for complex RL tasks where the traditional formulation of the problem fails to induce the desired breadth of agent behaviour.

顶级标签: reinforcement learning
详细标签: diversity reward uncertainty contextual bandits policy gradient behavioral diversity 或 搜索:

利用奖励不确定性在强化学习中诱导多样化行为 / Using Reward Uncertainty to Induce Diverse Behaviour in Reinforcement Learning


1️⃣ 一句话总结

本文提出了一种新的强化学习框架,通过将传统的单一奖励函数替换为奖励函数的概率分布,让智能体在面对不确定性时能自然地产生多样化且高效的行为,而无需在性能与随机性之间进行折中。

源自 arXiv: 2606.03962