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Related papers: Modulated Policy Hierarchies

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An important current challenge in Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) is to enable robots to learn on-the-fly from human feedback. However, humans show a great variability in the way they reward robots. We propose to address this issue by…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-05-11 Rémi Dromnelle , Benoît Girard , Erwan Renaudo , Raja Chatila , Mehdi Khamassi

Multi-task learning is a very challenging problem in reinforcement learning. While training multiple tasks jointly allow the policies to share parameters across different tasks, the optimization problem becomes non-trivial: It remains…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-08 Ruihan Yang , Huazhe Xu , Yi Wu , Xiaolong Wang

In this paper, we present a novel Heavy-Tailed Stochastic Policy Gradient (HT-PSG) algorithm to deal with the challenges of sparse rewards in continuous control problems. Sparse reward is common in continuous control robotics tasks such as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-14 Souradip Chakraborty , Amrit Singh Bedi , Alec Koppel , Pratap Tokekar , Dinesh Manocha

Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning (HRL) is well-suitedd for solving complex tasks by breaking them down into structured policies. However, HRL agents often struggle with efficient exploration and quick adaptation. To overcome these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-18 Arash Khajooeinejad , Fatemeh Sadat Masoumi , Masoumeh Chapariniya

Retrieving objects from clutters is a complex task, which requires multiple interactions with the environment until the target object can be extracted. These interactions involve executing action primitives like grasping or pushing as well…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-03-01 Oussama Zenkri , Ngo Anh Vien , Gerhard Neumann

Learning goal-directed behavior in environments with sparse feedback is a major challenge for reinforcement learning algorithms. The primary difficulty arises due to insufficient exploration, resulting in an agent being unable to learn…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-06-01 Tejas D. Kulkarni , Karthik R. Narasimhan , Ardavan Saeedi , Joshua B. Tenenbaum

Sparse reward problems are one of the biggest challenges in Reinforcement Learning. Goal-directed tasks are one such sparse reward problems where a reward signal is received only when the goal is reached. One promising way to train an agent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-11-06 Ameet Deshpande , Srikanth Sarma , Ashutosh Jha , Balaraman Ravindran

Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning (HRL) is a promising approach to solving long-horizon problems with sparse and delayed rewards. Many existing HRL algorithms either use pre-trained low-level skills that are unadaptable, or require…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-11 Siyuan Li , Rui Wang , Minxue Tang , Chongjie Zhang

Model-based planners and controllers are commonly used to solve complex manipulation problems as they can efficiently optimize diverse objectives and generalize to long horizon tasks. However, they often fail during deployment due to noisy…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-03-10 Shivam Vats , Devesh K. Jha , Maxim Likhachev , Oliver Kroemer , Diego Romeres

We address the problem of learning hierarchical deep neural network policies for reinforcement learning. In contrast to methods that explicitly restrict or cripple lower layers of a hierarchy to force them to use higher-level modulating…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-09-05 Tuomas Haarnoja , Kristian Hartikainen , Pieter Abbeel , Sergey Levine

Deep reinforcement learning has achieved many impressive results in recent years. However, tasks with sparse rewards or long horizons continue to pose significant challenges. To tackle these important problems, we propose a general…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-04-12 Carlos Florensa , Yan Duan , Pieter Abbeel

Humanoid robots must master numerous tasks with sparse rewards, posing a challenge for reinforcement learning (RL). We propose a method combining RL and automated planning to address this. Our approach uses short goal-conditioned policies…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-01-06 Gavin B. Rens

We study reinforcement learning in hybrid discrete-continuous action spaces, such as settings where the discrete component selects a regime (or index) and the continuous component optimizes within it -- a structure common in robotics,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Matias Alvo , Daniel Russo , Yash Kanoria

In spite of the success of existing meta reinforcement learning methods, they still have difficulty in learning a meta policy effectively for RL problems with sparse reward. In this respect, we develop a novel meta reinforcement learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-08 Yun Hua , Xiangfeng Wang , Bo Jin , Wenhao Li , Junchi Yan , Xiaofeng He , Hongyuan Zha

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-16 Yijie Guo , Jongwook Choi , Marcin Moczulski , Shengyu Feng , Samy Bengio , Mohammad Norouzi , Honglak Lee

We propose an active learning architecture for robots, capable of organizing its learning process to achieve a field of complex tasks by learning sequences of motor policies, called Intrinsically Motivated Procedure Babbling (IM-PB). The…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2019-02-18 Nicolas Duminy , Sao Mai Nguyen , Dominique Duhaut

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has shown promise in aligning large language models (LLMs). Yet its reliance on a singular reward model often overlooks the diversity of human preferences. Recent approaches address this…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-23 Tianze Wang , Dongnan Gui , Yifan Hu , Shuhang Lin , Linjun Zhang

Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms can suffer from poor sample efficiency when rewards are delayed and sparse. We introduce a solution that enables agents to learn temporally extended actions at multiple levels of abstraction in a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-03-11 Andrew Levy , Robert Platt , Kate Saenko

Learning interpretable and transferable subpolicies and performing task decomposition from a single, complex task is difficult. Some traditional hierarchical reinforcement learning techniques enforce this decomposition in a top-down manner,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-03-06 Bohan Wu , Jayesh K. Gupta , Mykel J. Kochenderfer

Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning (HRL) frameworks like Option-Critic (OC) and Multi-updates Option Critic (MOC) have introduced significant advancements in learning reusable options. However, these methods underperform in multi-goal…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Gabriel Romio , Mateus Begnini Melchiades , Bruno Castro da Silva , Gabriel de Oliveira Ramos