Papers › Trust, but verify: model-based exploration in sparse reward environments
Trust, but verify: model-based exploration in sparse reward environments
Konrad Czechowski, Tomasz Odrzygóźdź, Michał Izworski, Marek Zbysiński, Łukasz Kuciński, Piotr Miłoś
We propose trust-but-verify (TBV) mechanism, a new method which uses model uncertainty estimates to guide exploration. The mechanism augments graph search planning algorithms by the capacity to deal with learned model's imperfections. We identify certain type of frequent model errors, which we dub false loops, and which are particularly dangerous for graph search algorithms in discrete environments. These errors impose falsely pessimistic expectations and thus hinder exploration. We confirm this experimentally and show that TBV can effectively alleviate them. TBV combined with MCTS or Best First Search forms an effective model-based reinforcement learning solution, which is able to robustly solve sparse reward problems.
Code
Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.
Code Syntology ran Syntology
Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.
Tasks
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.
Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections