Related papers: Accelerated Robot Learning via Human Brain Signals

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a popular approach for robotic path planning in uncertain environments. However, the control policies trained for an RL agent crucially depend on user-defined, state-based reward functions. Poorly designed…

Recent studies have shown that reinforcement learning (RL) models are vulnerable in various noisy scenarios. For instance, the observed reward channel is often subject to noise in practice (e.g., when rewards are collected through sensors),…

Controlled text generation tasks such as unsupervised text style transfer have increasingly adopted the use of Reinforcement Learning (RL). A major challenge in applying RL to such tasks is the sparse reward, which is available only after…

Conveying complex objectives to reinforcement learning (RL) agents can often be difficult, involving meticulous design of reward functions that are sufficiently informative yet easy enough to provide. Human-in-the-loop RL methods allow…

The complexity of designing reward functions has been a major obstacle to the wide application of deep reinforcement learning (RL) techniques. Describing an agent's desired behaviors and properties can be difficult, even for experts. A new…

Reward function design and exploration time are arguably the biggest obstacles to the deployment of reinforcement learning (RL) agents in the real world. In many real-world tasks, designing a reward function takes considerable hand…

Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods have emerged as a popular choice for training an efficient and effective dialogue policy. However, these methods suffer from sparse and unstable reward signals returned by a user simulator only when a…

This paper extends recent work in interactive machine learning (IML) focused on effectively incorporating human feedback. We show how control and feedback signals complement each other in systems which model human reward. We demonstrate…

Reward machines are an established tool for dealing with reinforcement learning problems in which rewards are sparse and depend on complex sequences of actions. However, existing algorithms for learning reward machines assume an overly…

Meta reinforcement learning (meta-RL) aims to learn a policy solving a set of training tasks simultaneously and quickly adapting to new tasks. It requires massive amounts of data drawn from training tasks to infer the common structure…

Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents require the specification of a reward signal for learning behaviours. However, introduction of corrupt or stochastic rewards can yield high variance in learning. Such corruption may be a direct result of…

Demonstration-guided reinforcement learning (RL) is a promising approach for learning complex behaviors by leveraging both reward feedback and a set of target task demonstrations. Prior approaches for demonstration-guided RL treat every new…

Applying reinforcement learning (RL) to sparse reward domains is notoriously challenging due to insufficient guiding signals. Common RL techniques for addressing such domains include (1) learning from demonstrations and (2) curriculum…

Imitation learning is an effective alternative approach to learn a policy when the reward function is sparse. In this paper, we consider a challenging setting where an agent and an expert use different actions from each other. We assume…

Reinforcement Learning (RL) plays an important role in the robotic manipulation domain since it allows self-learning from trial-and-error interactions with the environment. Still, sample efficiency and reward specification seriously limit…

The main challenge in developing effective reinforcement learning (RL) pipelines is often the design and tuning the reward functions. Well-designed shaping reward can lead to significantly faster learning. Naively formulated rewards,…

To create useful reinforcement learning (RL) agents, step zero is to design a suitable reward function that captures the nuances of the task. However, reward engineering can be a difficult and time-consuming process. Instead,…

Ideally, we would place a robot in a real-world environment and leave it there improving on its own by gathering more experience autonomously. However, algorithms for autonomous robotic learning have been challenging to realize in the real…

We propose a general and model-free approach for Reinforcement Learning (RL) on real robotics with sparse rewards. We build upon the Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (DDPG) algorithm to use demonstrations. Both demonstrations and actual…

Building assistive interfaces for controlling robots through arbitrary, high-dimensional, noisy inputs (e.g., webcam images of eye gaze) can be challenging, especially when it involves inferring the user's desired action in the absence of a…