Related papers: Adaptive Variance for Changing Sparse-Reward Envir…

Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms find applications in inventory control, recommender systems, vehicular traffic management, cloud computing and robotics. The real-world complications of many tasks arising in these domains makes them…

The policy gradient approach is a flexible and powerful reinforcement learning method particularly for problems with continuous actions such as robot control. A common challenge in this scenario is how to reduce the variance of policy…

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…

Robots operating in human-centered environments should have the ability to understand how objects function: what can be done with each object, where this interaction may occur, and how the object is used to achieve a goal. To this end, we…

A variety of autonomous navigation algorithms exist that allow robots to move around in a safe and fast manner. However, many of these algorithms require parameter re-tuning when facing new environments. In this paper, we propose PTDRL, a…

Many potential applications of reinforcement learning (RL) are stymied by the large numbers of samples required to learn an effective policy. This is especially true when applying RL to real-world control tasks, e.g. in the sciences or…

Exploration in environments with continuous control and sparse rewards remains a key challenge in reinforcement learning (RL). Recently, surprise has been used as an intrinsic reward that encourages systematic and efficient exploration. We…

Cultures around the world show varying levels of conservatism. While maintaining traditional ideas prevents wrong ones from being embraced, it also slows or prevents adaptation to new times. Without exploration there can be no improvement,…

We study the problem of learning a good set of policies, so that when combined together, they can solve a wide variety of unseen reinforcement learning tasks with no or very little new data. Specifically, we consider the framework of…

Many robotic exploration algorithms rely on graph structures for frontier-based exploration and dynamic path planning. However, these graphs grow rapidly, accumulating redundant information and impacting performance. We present a…

Exploring lunar lava tubes requires robots to traverse without human intervention. Because pre-trained policies cannot fully cover all possible terrain conditions, our goal is to enable adaptive policy switching, where the robot selects an…

Searching the space of policies directly for the optimal policy has been one popular method for solving partially observable reinforcement learning problems. Typically, with each change of the target policy, its value is estimated from the…

Biological populations are subject to fluctuating environmental conditions. Different adaptive strategies can allow them to cope with these fluctuations: specialization to one particular environmental condition, adoption of a generalist…

The tendency of repeating past choices more often than expected from the history of outcomes has been repeatedly empirically observed in reinforcement learning experiments. It can be explained by at least two computational processes:…

Reinforcement learning (RL) agents often face challenges in balancing exploration and exploitation, particularly in environments where sparse or dense rewards bias learning. Biological systems, such as human toddlers, naturally navigate…

When working alongside human collaborators in dynamic and unstructured environments, such as disaster recovery or military operation, fast field adaptation is necessary for an unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) to perform its duties or learn…

Reinforcement learning (RL), particularly in sparse reward settings, often requires prohibitively large numbers of interactions with the environment, thereby limiting its applicability to complex problems. To address this, several prior…

Deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) is mainly studied in a setting where the training and the testing environments are similar. But in many practical applications, these environments may differ. For instance, in control systems, the robot(s)…

When robots are deployed in the field for environmental monitoring they typically execute pre-programmed motions, such as lawnmower paths, instead of adaptive methods, such as informative path planning. One reason for this is that adaptive…

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,…