Related papers: Multi-objective Model-based Policy Search for Data…
In recent years Landmark Complexes have been successfully employed for localization-free and metric-free autonomous exploration using a group of sensing-limited and communication-limited robots in a GPS-denied environment. To ensure rapid…
Finding optimal policies which maximize long term rewards of Markov Decision Processes requires the use of dynamic programming and backward induction to solve the Bellman optimality equation. However, many real-world problems require…
Deep learning has achieved remarkable successes in solving challenging reinforcement learning (RL) problems when dense reward function is provided. However, in sparse reward environment it still often suffers from the need to carefully…
Exploration is essential in reinforcement learning as an agent relies on trial and error to learn an optimal policy. However, when rewards are sparse, naive exploration strategies, like noise injection, are often insufficient. Intrinsic…
Reinforcement learning with sparse rewards is challenging because an agent can rarely obtain non-zero rewards and hence, gradient-based optimization of parameterized policies can be incremental and slow. Recent work demonstrated that using…
Black-box policy optimization is a class of reinforcement learning algorithms that explores and updates the policies at the parameter level. This class of algorithms is widely applied in robotics with movement primitives or…
We propose and study a general framework for regularized Markov decision processes (MDPs) where the goal is to find an optimal policy that maximizes the expected discounted total reward plus a policy regularization term. The extant…
Learning a near optimal policy in a partially observable system remains an elusive challenge in contemporary reinforcement learning. In this work, we consider episodic reinforcement learning in a reward-mixing Markov decision process (MDP).…
This paper presents a method for identifying mechanical parameters of robots or objects, such as their mass and friction coefficients. Key features are the use of off-the-shelf physics engines and the adaptation of a Bayesian optimization…
Constrained decision-making is essential for designing safe policies in real-world control systems, yet simulated environments often fail to capture real-world adversities. We consider the problem of learning a policy that will maximize the…
Learning effective policies for sparse objectives is a key challenge in Deep Reinforcement Learning (RL). A common approach is to design task-related dense rewards to improve task learnability. While such rewards are easily interpreted,…
In traditional reinforcement learning (RL), the learner aims to solve a single objective optimization problem: find the policy that maximizes expected reward. However, in many real-world settings, it is important to optimize over multiple…
In the Reinforcement Learning (RL) framework, the learning is guided through a reward signal. This means that in situations of sparse rewards the agent has to focus on exploration, in order to discover which action, or set of actions leads…
We consider the joint design and control of discrete-time stochastic dynamical systems over a finite time horizon. We formulate the problem as a multi-step optimization problem under uncertainty seeking to identify a system design and a…
Learning an optimal policy from a multi-modal reward function is a challenging problem in reinforcement learning (RL). Hierarchical RL (HRL) tackles this problem by learning a hierarchical policy, where multiple option policies are in…
The aim of this paper is to study the reward based policy exploration problem in a supervised learning approach and enable robots to form complex movement trajectories in challenging reward settings and search spaces. For this, the…
We investigate the problems of model estimation and reward-free learning in episodic Block MDPs. In these MDPs, the decision maker has access to rich observations or contexts generated from a small number of latent states. We are first…
One of the main challenges in reinforcement learning is solving tasks with sparse reward. We show that the difficulty of discovering a distant rewarding state in an MDP is bounded by the expected cover time of a random walk over the graph…
What is a good exploration strategy for an agent that interacts with an environment in the absence of external rewards? Ideally, we would like to get a policy driving towards a uniform state-action visitation (highly exploring) in a minimum…
Solving multi-goal reinforcement learning (RL) problems with sparse rewards is generally challenging. Existing approaches have utilized goal relabeling on collected experiences to alleviate issues raised from sparse rewards. However, these…