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Related papers: Episodic Curiosity through Reachability

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Reward shaping is an effective technique for incorporating domain knowledge into reinforcement learning (RL). Existing approaches such as potential-based reward shaping normally make full use of a given shaping reward function. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-06 Yujing Hu , Weixun Wang , Hangtian Jia , Yixiang Wang , Yingfeng Chen , Jianye Hao , Feng Wu , Changjie Fan

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-03 Muhammed Yusuf Satici , David L. Roberts

In this work we consider partially observable environments with sparse rewards. We present a self-supervised representation learning method for image-based observations, which arranges embeddings respecting temporal distance of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-07 Aleksandr Ermolov , Nicu Sebe

Long-term temporal credit assignment is an important challenge in deep reinforcement learning (RL). It refers to the ability of the agent to attribute actions to consequences that may occur after a long time interval. Existing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-27 Tanmay Gangwani , Yuan Zhou , Jian Peng

Much of the current work on reinforcement learning studies episodic settings, where the agent is reset between trials to an initial state distribution, often with well-shaped reward functions. Non-episodic settings, where the agent must…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-23 John D. Co-Reyes , Suvansh Sanjeev , Glen Berseth , Abhishek Gupta , Sergey Levine

Learning about many things can provide numerous benefits to a reinforcement learning system. For example, learning many auxiliary value functions, in addition to optimizing the environmental reward, appears to improve both exploration and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-25 Cam Linke , Nadia M. Ady , Martha White , Thomas Degris , Adam White

Optimistic value estimates provide one mechanism for directed exploration in reinforcement learning (RL). The agent acts greedily with respect to an estimate of the value plus what can be seen as a value bonus. The value bonus can be…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-16 Abdul Wahab , Raksha Kumaraswamy , Martha White

When a person is not satisfied with how a robot performs a task, they can intervene to correct it. Reward learning methods enable the robot to adapt its reward function online based on such human input, but they rely on handcrafted…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-01-13 Andreea Bobu , Marius Wiggert , Claire Tomlin , Anca D. Dragan

Games are challenging for Reinforcement Learning~(RL) agents due to their reward-sparsity, as rewards are only obtainable after long sequences of deliberate actions. Intrinsic Motivation~(IM) methods -- which introduce exploration rewards…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-07-29 Leonardo Villalobos-Arias , Grant Forbes , Jianxun Wang , David L Roberts , Arnav Jhala

Simulating trajectories of virtual crowds is a commonly encountered task in Computer Graphics. Several recent works have applied Reinforcement Learning methods to animate virtual agents, however they often make different design choices when…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-21 Ariel Kwiatkowski , Vicky Kalogeiton , Julien Pettré , Marie-Paule Cani

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-02-19 Hao Liu , Alexander Trott , Richard Socher , Caiming Xiong

Domain adaptation is a common problem in robotics, with applications such as transferring policies from simulation to real world and lifelong learning. Performing such adaptation, however, requires informative data about the environment to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-15 Karol Arndt , Oliver Struckmeier , Ville Kyrki

Reinforcement Learning faces an important challenge in partial observable environments that has long-term dependencies. In order to learn in an ambiguous environment, an agent has to keep previous perceptions in a memory. Earlier memory…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-22 Alper Demir

Our goal in this paper is to plan the motion of a robot in a partitioned environment with dynamically changing, locally sensed rewards. We assume that arbitrary assumptions on the reward dynamics can be given. The robot aims to accomplish a…

Robotics · Computer Science 2012-08-30 Maria Svorenova , Jana Tumova , Jiri Barnat , Ivana Cerna

Infants are experts at playing, with an amazing ability to generate novel structured behaviors in unstructured environments that lack clear extrinsic reward signals. We seek to replicate some of these abilities with a neural network that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-02-22 Nick Haber , Damian Mrowca , Li Fei-Fei , Daniel L. K. Yamins

We introduce Random Latent Exploration (RLE), a simple yet effective exploration strategy in reinforcement learning (RL). On average, RLE outperforms noise-based methods, which perturb the agent's actions, and bonus-based exploration, which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-28 Srinath Mahankali , Zhang-Wei Hong , Ayush Sekhari , Alexander Rakhlin , Pulkit Agrawal

Robots can learn the right reward function by querying a human expert. Existing approaches attempt to choose questions where the robot is most uncertain about the human's response; however, they do not consider how easy it will be for the…

Robotics · Computer Science 2019-10-11 Erdem Bıyık , Malayandi Palan , Nicholas C. Landolfi , Dylan P. Losey , Dorsa Sadigh

Designing effective reward functions remains a central challenge in reinforcement learning, especially in multi-objective environments. In this work, we propose Multi-Objective Reward Shaping with Exploration (MORSE), a general framework…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-18 Yuqing Xie , Jiayu Chen , Wenhao Tang , Ya Zhang , Chao Yu , Yu Wang

Reward design for reinforcement learning agents can be difficult in situations where one not only wants the agent to achieve some effect in the world but where one also cares about how that effect is achieved. For example, we might wish for…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-01-25 Xiangyu Peng , Christopher Cui , Wei Zhou , Renee Jia , Mark Riedl

We study the repeated principal-agent bandit game, where the principal indirectly interacts with the unknown environment by proposing incentives for the agent to play arms. Most existing work assumes the agent has full knowledge of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Junyan Liu , Lillian J. Ratliff