Related papers: Backplay: "Man muss immer umkehren"
Exploration in environments with sparse rewards has been a persistent problem in reinforcement learning (RL). Many tasks are natural to specify with a sparse reward, and manually shaping a reward function can result in suboptimal…
Making sophisticated, robust, and safe sequential decisions is at the heart of intelligent systems. This is especially critical for planning in complex multi-agent environments, where agents need to anticipate other agents' intentions and…
Model-based Reinforcement Learning (MBRL) holds promise for data-efficiency by planning with model-generated experience in addition to learning with experience from the environment. However, in complex or changing environments, models in…
Meta reinforcement learning (Meta-RL) is an approach wherein the experience gained from solving a variety of tasks is distilled into a meta-policy. The meta-policy, when adapted over only a small (or just a single) number of steps, is able…
In reinforcement learning, experience replay stores past samples for further reuse. Prioritized sampling is a promising technique to better utilize these samples. Previous criteria of prioritization include TD error, recentness and…
Reinforcement learning (RL) studies how an agent comes to achieve reward in an environment through interactions over time. Recent advances in machine RL have surpassed human expertise at the world's oldest board games and many classic video…
Most provably-efficient learning algorithms introduce optimism about poorly-understood states and actions to encourage exploration. We study an alternative approach for efficient exploration, posterior sampling for reinforcement learning…
Hippocampal reverse replay is thought to contribute to learning, and particularly reinforcement learning, in animals. We present a computational model of learning in the hippocampus that builds on a previous model of the…
Reinforcement learning algorithms are typically designed for discrete-time dynamics, even though the underlying real-world control systems are often continuous in time. In this paper, we study the problem of continuous-time reinforcement…
Transfer of recent advances in deep reinforcement learning to real-world applications is hindered by high data demands and thus low efficiency and scalability. Through independent improvements of components such as replay buffers or more…
In this paper, we propose a multi-timescale replay (MTR) buffer for improving continual learning in RL agents faced with environments that are changing continuously over time at timescales that are unknown to the agent. The basic MTR buffer…
In human-in-the-loop reinforcement learning or environments where calculating a reward is expensive, the costly rewards can make learning efficiency challenging to achieve. The cost of obtaining feedback from humans or calculating expensive…
We introduce the forward-backward (FB) representation of the dynamics of a reward-free Markov decision process. It provides explicit near-optimal policies for any reward specified a posteriori. During an unsupervised phase, we use…
Deep reinforcement learning algorithms can learn complex behavioral skills, but real-world application of these methods requires a large amount of experience to be collected by the agent. In practical settings, such as robotics, this…
Safety is critical to broadening the application of reinforcement learning (RL). Often, we train RL agents in a controlled environment, such as a laboratory, before deploying them in the real world. However, the real-world target task might…
Reinforcement learning (RL) involves sequential decision making in uncertain environments. The aim of the decision-making agent is to maximize the benefit of acting in its environment over an extended period of time. Finding an optimal…
Finding meaningful and accurate dense rewards is a fundamental task in the field of reinforcement learning (RL) that enables agents to explore environments more efficiently. In traditional RL settings, agents learn optimal policies through…
Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) and Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have enabled powerful semantic and multimodal reasoning capabilities, creating new opportunities to enhance sample efficiency, high-level planning, and…
Sparse rewards present a difficult problem in reinforcement learning and may be inevitable in certain domains with complex dynamics such as real-world robotics. Hindsight Experience Replay (HER) is a recent replay memory development that…
In typical reinforcement learning (RL), the environment is assumed given and the goal of the learning is to identify an optimal policy for the agent taking actions through its interactions with the environment. In this paper, we extend this…