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Reinforcement learning has the potential to automate the acquisition of behavior in complex settings, but in order for it to be successfully deployed, a number of practical challenges must be addressed. First, in real world settings, when…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-11 Kelvin Xu , Siddharth Verma , Chelsea Finn , Sergey Levine

In standard reinforcement learning (RL), a learning agent seeks to optimize the overall reward. However, many key aspects of a desired behavior are more naturally expressed as constraints. For instance, the designer may want to limit the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-29 Sobhan Miryoosefi , Kianté Brantley , Hal Daumé , Miroslav Dudik , Robert Schapire

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 performance of reinforcement learning depends upon designing an appropriate action space, where the effect of each action is measurable, yet, granular enough to permit flexible behavior. So far, this process involved non-trivial user…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-08 Edoardo Cetin , Oya Celiktutan

Safe Reinforcement Learning (Safe RL) aims to ensure safety when an RL agent conducts learning by interacting with real-world environments where improper actions can induce high costs or lead to severe consequences. In this paper, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-06 Hanping Zhang , Yuhong Guo

Exploration in environments with continuous control and sparse rewards remains a key challenge in reinforcement learning (RL). Recently, surprise has been used as an intrinsic reward that encourages systematic and efficient exploration. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-01 Haitao Xu , Brendan McCane , Lech Szymanski

Safety is essential for reinforcement learning (RL) applied in real-world situations. Chance constraints are suitable to represent the safety requirements in stochastic systems. Previous chance-constrained RL methods usually have a low…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-17 Baiyu Peng , Yao Mu , Yang Guan , Shengbo Eben Li , Yuming Yin , Jianyu Chen

Reinforcement Learning (RL) in various decision-making tasks of machine learning provides effective results with an agent learning from a stand-alone reward function. However, it presents unique challenges with large amounts of environment…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-10 Neda Navidi

While reinforcement learning (RL) has the potential to enable robots to autonomously acquire a wide range of skills, in practice, RL usually requires manual, per-task engineering of reward functions, especially in real world settings where…

Robotics · Computer Science 2019-02-15 Tianhe Yu , Gleb Shevchuk , Dorsa Sadigh , Chelsea Finn

Deriving fast and effectively coordinated control actions remains a grand challenge affecting the secure and economic operation of today's large-scale power grid. This paper presents a novel artificial intelligence (AI) based methodology to…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-12-14 Ruisheng Diao , Di Shi , Bei Zhang , Siqi Wang , Haifeng Li , Chunlei Xu , Tu Lan , Desong Bian , Jiajun Duan

The problem of sparse rewards is one of the hardest challenges in contemporary reinforcement learning. Hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) tackles this problem by using a set of temporally-extended actions, or options, each of which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-14 Nat Dilokthanakul , Christos Kaplanis , Nick Pawlowski , Murray Shanahan

Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) enables robots to perform some intelligent tasks end-to-end. However, there are still many challenges for long-horizon sparse-reward robotic manipulator tasks. On the one hand, a sparse-reward setting…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-12-07 Guangming Wang , Minjian Xin , Wenhua Wu , Zhe Liu , Hesheng Wang

Reinforcement learning (RL) in sparse-reward environments remains a significant challenge due to the lack of informative feedback. We propose a simple yet effective method that uses a small number of successful demonstrations to initialize…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-29 Seyed Mahdi Basiri Azad , Joschka Boedecker

Humans decompose novel complex tasks into simpler ones to exploit previously learned skills. Analogously, hierarchical reinforcement learning seeks to leverage lower-level policies for simple tasks to solve complex ones. However, because…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-15 Ju-Seung Byun , Andrew Perrault

Reinforcement learning is a promising framework for solving control problems, but its use in practical situations is hampered by the fact that reward functions are often difficult to engineer. Specifying goals and tasks for autonomous…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-02-22 Justin Fu , Anoop Korattikara , Sergey Levine , Sergio Guadarrama

Reinforcement learning optimizes policies for expected cumulative reward. Need the supervision be so narrow? Reward is delayed and sparse for many tasks, making it a difficult and impoverished signal for end-to-end optimization. To augment…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-03-10 Evan Shelhamer , Parsa Mahmoudieh , Max Argus , Trevor Darrell

Deep neural networks coupled with fast simulation and improved computation have led to recent successes in the field of reinforcement learning (RL). However, most current RL-based approaches fail to generalize since: (a) the gap between…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-03-09 Lerrel Pinto , James Davidson , Rahul Sukthankar , Abhinav Gupta

Due to their complex nonlinear dynamics and batch-to-batch variability, batch processes pose a challenge for process control. Due to the absence of accurate models and resulting plant-model mismatch, these problems become harder to address…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-03 Tanuja Joshi , Hariprasad Kodamana , Harikumar Kandath , Niket Kaisare

Autonomous vehicles inevitably encounter a vast array of scenarios in real-world environments. Addressing long-tail scenarios, particularly those involving intensive interactions with numerous traffic participants, remains one of the most…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-12-16 Guanzhou Li , Jianping Wu , Yujing He

Developing autonomous vehicles (AVs) requires not only safety and efficiency, but also realistic, human-like behaviors that are socially aware and predictable. Achieving this requires sim agent policies that are human-like, fast, and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-26 Wei-Jer Chang , Akshay Rangesh , Kevin Joseph , Matthew Strong , Masayoshi Tomizuka , Yihan Hu , Wei Zhan