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Related papers: Discovery of Useful Questions as Auxiliary Tasks

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Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms have demonstrated promising results on complex tasks, yet often require impractical numbers of samples since they learn from scratch. Meta-RL aims to address this challenge by leveraging experience…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-28 Russell Mendonca , Abhishek Gupta , Rosen Kralev , Pieter Abbeel , Sergey Levine , Chelsea Finn

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a powerful machine learning technique that has been successfully applied to a wide variety of problems. However, it can be unpredictable and produce suboptimal results in complicated learning environments.…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2024-11-19 Brian Mintz , Feng Fu

To solve difficult tasks, humans ask questions to acquire knowledge from external sources. In contrast, classical reinforcement learning agents lack such an ability and often resort to exploratory behavior. This is exacerbated as few…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-07-05 Iou-Jen Liu , Xingdi Yuan , Marc-Alexandre Côté , Pierre-Yves Oudeyer , Alexander G. Schwing

Counterfactual explanations are a common tool to explain artificial intelligence models. For Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents, they answer "Why not?" or "What if?" questions by illustrating what minimal change to a state is needed such…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-27 Tobias Huber , Maximilian Demmler , Silvan Mertes , Matthew L. Olson , Elisabeth André

We consider the inventory management problem, where the goal is to balance conflicting objectives such as availability and wastage of a large range of products in a store. We propose a reinforcement learning (RL) approach that utilises…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-07 Durgesh Kalwar , Omkar Shelke , Harshad Khadilkar

A good state representation is crucial to solving complicated reinforcement learning (RL) challenges. Many recent works focus on designing auxiliary losses for learning informative representations. Unfortunately, these handcrafted…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-13 Tairan He , Yuge Zhang , Kan Ren , Minghuan Liu , Che Wang , Weinan Zhang , Yuqing Yang , Dongsheng Li

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a promising approach for solving robotic manipulation tasks. However, it is challenging to apply the RL algorithms directly in the real world. For one thing, RL is data-intensive and typically requires…

Humans achieve efficient learning by relying on prior knowledge about the structure of naturally occurring tasks. There is considerable interest in designing reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms with similar properties. This includes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-23 Jan Humplik , Alexandre Galashov , Leonard Hasenclever , Pedro A. Ortega , Yee Whye Teh , Nicolas Heess

The advent of large language models (LLMs) has transformed information access and reasoning through open-ended natural language interaction. However, LLMs remain limited by static knowledge, factual hallucinations, and the inability to…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-29 Minhua Lin , Zongyu Wu , Zhichao Xu , Hui Liu , Xianfeng Tang , Qi He , Charu Aggarwal , Hui Liu , Xiang Zhang , Suhang Wang

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a general framework for adaptive control, which has proven to be efficient in many domains, e.g., board games, video games or autonomous vehicles. In such problems, an agent faces a sequential decision-making…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-16 Olivier Buffet , Olivier Pietquin , Paul Weng

Reward engineering has long been a challenge in Reinforcement Learning (RL) research, as it often requires extensive human effort and iterative processes of trial-and-error to design effective reward functions. In this paper, we propose…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-06-18 Yufei Wang , Zhanyi Sun , Jesse Zhang , Zhou Xian , Erdem Biyik , David Held , Zackory Erickson

The goal of reinforcement learning algorithms is to estimate and/or optimise the value function. However, unlike supervised learning, no teacher or oracle is available to provide the true value function. Instead, the majority of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-05-25 Zhongwen Xu , Hado van Hasselt , David Silver

Artificial intelligence progresses towards the "Era of Experience," where agents are expected to learn from continuous, grounded interaction. We argue that traditional Reinforcement Learning (RL), which typically represents value as a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-29 Xidong Feng , Bo Liu , Yan Song , Haotian Fu , Ziyu Wan , Girish A. Koushik , Zhiyuan Hu , Mengyue Yang , Ying Wen , Jun Wang

Reinforcement learning requires interaction with an environment, which is expensive for robots. This constraint necessitates approaches that work with limited environmental interaction by maximizing the reuse of previous experiences. We…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-04-05 Benedict Quartey , Ankit Shah , George Konidaris

The central tenet of reinforcement learning (RL) is that agents seek to maximize the sum of cumulative rewards. In contrast, active inference, an emerging framework within cognitive and computational neuroscience, proposes that agents act…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-02 Alexander Tschantz , Beren Millidge , Anil K. Seth , Christopher L. Buckley

Designing suitable reward functions for numerous interacting intelligent agents is challenging in real-world applications. Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) in mean field games (MFGs) offers a practical framework to infer reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-05 Yang Chen , Xiao Lin , Bo Yan , Libo Zhang , Jiamou Liu , Neset Özkan Tan , Michael Witbrock

To increase autonomy in reinforcement learning, agents need to learn useful behaviours without reliance on manually designed reward functions. To that end, skill discovery methods have been used to learn the intrinsic options available to…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-08-05 Even Klemsdal , Sverre Herland , Abdulmajid Murad

The development of autonomous agents for complex, long-horizon tasks is a central goal in AI. However, dominant training paradigms face a critical limitation: reinforcement learning (RL) methods that optimize solely for final task success…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-31 Zijing Zhang , Ziyang Chen , Mingxiao Li , Zhaopeng Tu , Xiaolong Li

Auxiliary tasks have been argued to be useful for representation learning in reinforcement learning. Although many auxiliary tasks have been empirically shown to be effective for accelerating learning on the main task, it is not yet clear…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-04-04 Banafsheh Rafiee , Jun Jin , Jun Luo , Adam White

Traditionally, Reinforcement Learning (RL) aims at deciding how to act optimally for an artificial agent. We argue that deciding when to act is equally important. As humans, we drift from default, instinctive or memorized behaviors to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-17 Alexis Jacq , Johan Ferret , Olivier Pietquin , Matthieu Geist