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Learning from human feedback has shown to be a useful approach in acquiring robot reward functions. However, expert feedback is often assumed to be drawn from an underlying unimodal reward function. This assumption does not always hold…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-20 Vivek Myers , Erdem Bıyık , Nima Anari , Dorsa Sadigh

Mobile service robots are increasingly prevalent in human-centric, real-world domains, operating autonomously in unconstrained indoor environments. In such a context, robotic vision plays a central role in enabling service robots to…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-10-20 Michele Antonazzi , Matteo Luperto , N. Alberto Borghese , Nicola Basilico

Intrinsically motivated goal exploration algorithms enable machines to discover repertoires of policies that produce a diversity of effects in complex environments. These exploration algorithms have been shown to allow real world robots to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-10-11 Alexandre Péré , Sébastien Forestier , Olivier Sigaud , Pierre-Yves Oudeyer

We propose a general and model-free approach for Reinforcement Learning (RL) on real robotics with sparse rewards. We build upon the Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (DDPG) algorithm to use demonstrations. Both demonstrations and actual…

In artificial intelligence, we often specify tasks through a reward function. While this works well in some settings, many tasks are hard to specify this way. In deep reinforcement learning, for example, directly specifying a reward as a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-08-09 Matthew Rahtz , James Fang , Anca D. Dragan , Dylan Hadfield-Menell

Well-designed dense reward functions in robot manipulation not only indicate whether a task is completed but also encode progress along the way. Generally, designing dense rewards is challenging and usually requires access to privileged…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-03-19 Pierre Krack , Tobias Jülg , Wolfram Burgard , Florian Walter

The ability to autonomously explore and resolve tasks with minimal human guidance is crucial for the self-development of embodied intelligence. Although reinforcement learning methods can largely ease human effort, it's challenging to…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-12-19 Changxin Huang , Yanbin Chang , Junfan Lin , Junyang Liang , Runhao Zeng , Jianqiang Li

Dexterous robotic hands are essential for performing complex manipulation tasks, yet remain difficult to train due to the challenges of demonstration collection and high-dimensional control. While reinforcement learning (RL) can alleviate…

Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) has progressed significantly toward accurately learning the underlying rewards in both discrete and continuous domains from behavior data. The next advance is to learn {\em intrinsic} preferences in ways…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Yikang Gui , Prashant Doshi

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has been widely used to solve tasks where the environment consistently provides a dense reward value. However, in real-world scenarios, rewards can often be poorly defined or sparse. Auxiliary signals are…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-08-01 David Valencia , Henry Williams , Yuning Xing , Trevor Gee , Minas Liarokapis , Bruce A. MacDonald

Preference-based learning of reward functions, where the reward function is learned using comparison data, has been well studied for complex robotic tasks such as autonomous driving. Existing algorithms have focused on learning reward…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-03-05 Sydney M. Katz , Amir Maleki , Erdem Bıyık , Mykel J. Kochenderfer

Reward design remains a significant bottleneck in applying reinforcement learning (RL) to real-world problems. A popular alternative is reward learning, where reward functions are inferred from human feedback rather than manually specified.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-16 Chaitanya Kharyal , Calarina Muslimani , Matthew E. Taylor

Training novice users to operate an excavator for learning different skills requires the presence of expert teachers. Considering the complexity of the problem, it is comparatively expensive to find skilled experts as the process is…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-11-16 Pranav Agarwal , Marek Teichmann , Sheldon Andrews , Samira Ebrahimi Kahou

Robotic insertion tasks are characterized by contact and friction mechanics, making them challenging for conventional feedback control methods due to unmodeled physical effects. Reinforcement learning (RL) is a promising approach for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-05-26 Gerrit Schoettler , Ashvin Nair , Juan Aparicio Ojea , Sergey Levine , Eugen Solowjow

Reinforcement learning (RL) has demonstrated compelling performance in robotic tasks, but its success often hinges on the design of complex, ad hoc reward functions. Researchers have explored how Large Language Models (LLMs) could enable…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-05-13 Letian Chen , Nina Moorman , Matthew Gombolay

Humans can leverage hierarchical structures to split a task into sub-tasks and solve problems efficiently. Both imitation and reinforcement learning or a combination of them with hierarchical structures have been proven to be an efficient…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-12-15 Yaru Niu , Yijun Gu

Goals for reinforcement learning problems are typically defined through hand-specified rewards. To design such problems, developers of learning algorithms must inherently be aware of what the task goals are, yet we often require agents to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-03-29 Ashley D. Edwards , Laura Downs , James C. Davidson

Reward shaping is one of the most effective methods to tackle the crucial yet challenging problem of credit assignment in Reinforcement Learning (RL). However, designing shaping functions usually requires much expert knowledge and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-01-29 Haosheng Zou , Tongzheng Ren , Dong Yan , Hang Su , Jun Zhu

In order to provide adaptive and user-friendly solutions to robotic manipulation, it is important that the agent can learn to accomplish tasks even if they are only provided with very sparse instruction signals. To address the issues…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-06-18 Siyu Dai , Wei Xu , Andreas Hofmann , Brian Williams

The objective of many real-world tasks is complex and difficult to procedurally specify. This makes it necessary to use reward or imitation learning algorithms to infer a reward or policy directly from human data. Existing benchmarks for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-03 Pedro Freire , Adam Gleave , Sam Toyer , Stuart Russell