Flipping Coins to Estimate Pseudocounts for Exploration in Reinforcement
  Learning
Sam Lobel Akhil Bagaria George Konidaris
We propose a new method for count-based exploration in high-dimensional state
spaces. Unlike previous work which relies on density models, we show that
counts can be derived by averaging samples from the Rademacher distribution (or
coin flips). This insight is used to set up a simple supervised learning
objective which, when optimized, yields a state's visitation count. We show
that our method is significantly more effective at deducing ground-truth
visitation counts than previous work; when used as an exploration bonus for a
model-free reinforcement learning algorithm, it outperforms existing approaches
on most of 9 challenging exploration tasks, including the Atari game
Montezuma's Revenge.