Not all uncertainty is alike: volatility, stochasticity, and exploration

Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence [Submitted on 19 May 2026] Not all uncertainty is alike: volatility, stochasticity, and exploration Payam Piray Adaptive decision-making in biological and artificial intelligence requires balancing the exploitation of known outcomes with the exploration of uncertain alternatives. Although prior work suggests that uncertainty generally promotes exploration, it has typically treated distinct sources of environmental uncertainty as equivalent. We consider environments with latent reward states that drift over time (volatility) and are observed through noisy outcomes (stochasticity). Both increase posterior uncertainty, yet we show they drive optimal exploration in opposite directions: volatility enhances it, stochasticity suppresses it. We establish this asymmetry formally by extending the Gittins index framework to Gaussian state-space bandits with latent dynamics. We further derive Cause-Aware Uncertainty-Sensitive Exploration (CAUSE), a closed-form exploration bonus obtained via control-as-inference that inherits the same monotonicities. CAUSE outperforms standard exploration strategies in environments with heterogeneous noise structure, and also improves on a Gittins-per-arm policy whose rested-bandit optimality does not transfer to restless settings. Learning and exploration are governed by the same noise-inference asymmetry, and the framework predicts that pathological noise inference produces \emph{reversed} rather than merely impaired exploration, with implications for computational accounts of psychiatric conditions. Subjects: Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) Cite as: arXiv:2605.19215 [cs.AI]   (or arXiv:2605.19215v1 [cs.AI] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2605.19215 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Payam Piray [view email] [v1] Tue, 19 May 2026 00:38:00 UTC (633 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.AI < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-05 Change to browse by: cs References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)