What is the exploration-exploitation tradeoff?
easyAnswer
- Exploitation uses the best-known action to maximize immediate reward; exploration tries new actions to discover potentially better ones.
- Too much exploitation = premature convergence; too much exploration = wasted samples.
- Strategies: epsilon-greedy, softmax/Boltzmann, entropy bonuses, UCB, Thompson sampling, curiosity/intrinsic rewards.
Check yourself — multiple choice
- Exploration means always taking the greedy action
- Epsilon-greedy explores with probability epsilon
- Exploitation means trying random actions
- There is no such tradeoff in modern RL
Epsilon-greedy picks a random action with prob epsilon, greedy otherwise.
#exploration
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