Related papers: Planning in Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning: G…

In this work, we provide theoretical guarantees for reward decomposition in deterministic MDPs. Reward decomposition is a special case of Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning, that allows one to learn many policies in parallel and combine…

Local Policy Search is a popular reinforcement learning approach for handling large state spaces. Formally, it searches locally in a paramet erized policy space in order to maximize the associated value function averaged over some…

Recent works using deep learning to solve the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) have focused on learning construction heuristics. Such approaches find TSP solutions of good quality but require additional procedures such as beam search and…

We present a method for a certain class of Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) that can relate the optimal policy back to one or more reward sources in the environment. For a given initial state, without fully computing the value function,…

In this work we present a novel approach to hierarchical reinforcement learning for linearly-solvable Markov decision processes. Our approach assumes that the state space is partitioned, and the subtasks consist in moving between the…

This paper augments the reward received by a reinforcement learning agent with potential functions in order to help the agent learn (possibly stochastic) optimal policies. We show that a potential-based reward shaping scheme is able to…

In tabular multi-agent reinforcement learning with average-cost criterion, a team of agents sequentially interacts with the environment and observes local incentives. We focus on the case that the global reward is a sum of local rewards,…

Designing reliable decision strategies for autonomous urban driving is challenging. Reinforcement learning (RL) has been used to automatically derive suitable behavior in uncertain environments, but it does not provide any guarantee on the…

Recent work investigated the use of Reinforcement Learning (RL) for the synthesis of heuristic guidance to improve the performance of temporal planners when a domain is fixed and a set of training problems (not plans) is given. The idea is…

Motion generation in cluttered, dense, and dynamic environments is a central topic in robotics, rendered as a multi-objective decision-making problem. Current approaches trade-off between safety and performance. On the one hand, reactive…

One of the key challenges in applying reinforcement learning to real-life problems is that the amount of train-and-error required to learn a good policy increases drastically as the task becomes complex. One potential solution to this…

In most common settings of Markov Decision Process (MDP), an agent evaluate a policy based on expectation of (discounted) sum of rewards. However in many applications this criterion might not be suitable from two perspective: first, in risk…

The automatic synthesis of policies for robotic-control tasks through reinforcement learning relies on a reward signal that simultaneously captures many possibly conflicting requirements. In this paper, we in\-tro\-duce a novel,…

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).…

Despite advances in hierarchical reinforcement learning, its applications to path planning in autonomous driving on highways are challenging. One reason is that conventional hierarchical reinforcement learning approaches are not amenable to…

In many reinforcement learning (RL) applications, augmenting the task rewards with heuristic rewards that encode human priors about how a task should be solved is crucial for achieving desirable performance. However, because such heuristics…

This paper bridges some of the gap between optimal planning and reinforcement learning (RL), both of which share roots in dynamic programming applied to sequential decision making or optimal control. Whereas planning typically favors…

Reinforcement learning is a machine learning approach based on behavioral psychology. It is focused on learning agents that can acquire knowledge and learn to carry out new tasks by interacting with the environment. However, a problem…

We present an approach for safe trajectory planning, where a strategic task related to autonomous racing is learned sample-efficient within a simulation environment. A high-level policy, represented as a neural network, outputs a reward…

Commonly in reinforcement learning (RL), rewards are discounted over time using an exponential function to model time preference, thereby bounding the expected long-term reward. In contrast, in economics and psychology, it has been shown…