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

ArXi:2605.19215v1 Announce Type: new 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.