Papers › MEET: A Monte Carlo Exploration-Exploitation Trade-off for Buffer Sampling

MEET: A Monte Carlo Exploration-Exploitation Trade-off for Buffer Sampling

24 Oct 2022arXiv:2210.13545archive 2025-07-28

Julius Ott, Lorenzo Servadei, Jose Arjona-Medina, Enrico Rinaldi, Gianfranco Mauro, Daniela Sánchez Lopera, Michael Stephan, Thomas Stadelmayer, Avik Santra, Robert Wille

Data selection is essential for any data-based optimization technique, such as Reinforcement Learning. State-of-the-art sampling strategies for the experience replay buffer improve the performance of the Reinforcement Learning agent. However, they do not incorporate uncertainty in the Q-Value estimation. Consequently, they cannot adapt the sampling strategies, including exploration and exploitation of transitions, to the complexity of the task. To address this, this paper proposes a new sampling strategy that leverages the exploration-exploitation trade-off. This is enabled by the uncertainty estimation of the Q-Value function, which guides the sampling to explore more significant transitions and, thus, learn a more efficient policy. Experiments on classical control environments demonstrate stable results across various environments. They show that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art sampling strategies for dense rewards w.r.t. convergence and peak performance by 26% on average.

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Reinforcement LearningReinforcement Learning (RL)reinforcement-learning

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Experience Replay

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