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Reward design is a fundamental, yet challenging aspect of reinforcement learning (RL). Researchers typically utilize feedback signals from the environment to handcraft a reward function, but this process is not always effective due to the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-11 Alexander Bukharin , Yixiao Li , Pengcheng He , Tuo Zhao

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…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-12-15 Hugo Muñoz , Ernesto Portugal , Angel Ayala , Bruno Fernandes , Francisco Cruz

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is increasingly used in autonomous driving (AD) and shows clear advantages. However, most RL-based AD methods overlook policy structure design. An RL policy that only outputs short-timescale vehicle control…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-11-25 Guizhe Jin , Zhuoren Li , Bo Leng , Ran Yu , Lu Xiong , Chen Sun

Humans decompose novel complex tasks into simpler ones to exploit previously learned skills. Analogously, hierarchical reinforcement learning seeks to leverage lower-level policies for simple tasks to solve complex ones. However, because…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-15 Ju-Seung Byun , Andrew Perrault

We study reinforcement learning (RL) problems in which agents observe the reward or transition realizations at their current state before deciding which action to take. Such observations are available in many applications, including…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-22 Nadav Merlis

Hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) learns to make decisions on multiple levels of temporal abstraction. A key challenge in HRL is that the low-level policy changes over time, making it difficult for the high-level policy to generate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-29 Vivienne Huiling Wang , Tinghuai Wang , Joni Pajarinen

Offline Reinforcement learning (RL) has shown potent in many safe-critical tasks in robotics where exploration is risky and expensive. However, it still struggles to acquire skills in temporally extended tasks. In this paper, we study the…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-05-25 Jinning Li , Chen Tang , Masayoshi Tomizuka , Wei Zhan

In reinforcement learning, pre-trained low-level skills have the potential to greatly facilitate exploration. However, prior knowledge of the downstream task is required to strike the right balance between generality (fine-grained control)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-22 Jonas Gehring , Gabriel Synnaeve , Andreas Krause , Nicolas Usunier

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

As reinforcement learning agents are tasked with solving more challenging and diverse tasks, the ability to incorporate prior knowledge into the learning system and to exploit reusable structure in solution space is likely to become…

Solving robotic navigation tasks via reinforcement learning (RL) is challenging due to their sparse reward and long decision horizon nature. However, in many navigation tasks, high-level (HL) task representations, like a rough floor plan,…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-11-08 Jan Wöhlke , Felix Schmitt , Herke van Hoof

Hierarchical reinforcement learning has been a compelling approach for achieving goal directed behavior over long sequences of actions. However, it has been challenging to implement in realistic or open-ended environments. A main challenge…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-22 Arun Ahuja , Kavya Kopparapu , Rob Fergus , Ishita Dasgupta

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has proven highly effective at enhancing the complex reasoning abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), yet underlying mechanisms driving this success remain largely opaque. Our analysis reveals that puzzling…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Haozhe Wang , Qixin Xu , Che Liu , Junhong Wu , Fangzhen Lin , Wenhu Chen

Hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) helps address large-scale and sparse reward issues in reinforcement learning. In HRL, the policy model has an inner representation structured in levels. With this structure, the reinforcement…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-02-07 Wen-Ji Zhou , Yang Yu

Hierarchies of temporally decoupled policies present a promising approach for enabling structured exploration in complex long-term planning problems. To fully achieve this approach an end-to-end training paradigm is needed. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-19 Abdul Rahman Kreidieh , Glen Berseth , Brandon Trabucco , Samyak Parajuli , Sergey Levine , Alexandre M. Bayen

Reinforcement learning (RL) techniques have been developed to optimize industrial cooling systems, offering substantial energy savings compared to traditional heuristic policies. A major challenge in industrial control involves learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-20 William Wong , Praneet Dutta , Octavian Voicu , Yuri Chervonyi , Cosmin Paduraru , Jerry Luo

Many real-world applications can be formulated as multi-agent cooperation problems, such as network packet routing and coordination of autonomous vehicles. The emergence of deep reinforcement learning (DRL) provides a promising approach for…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2022-06-28 Zhixuan Liang , Jiannong Cao , Shan Jiang , Divya Saxena , Huafeng Xu

A misspecified reward can degrade sample efficiency and induce undesired behaviors in reinforcement learning (RL) problems. We propose symbolic reward machines for incorporating high-level task knowledge when specifying the reward signals.…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-04-22 Weichao Zhou , Wenchao Li

Hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) is a promising approach to extend traditional reinforcement learning (RL) methods to solve more complex tasks. Yet, the majority of current HRL methods require careful task-specific design and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-10-08 Ofir Nachum , Shixiang Gu , Honglak Lee , Sergey Levine

Hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) has seen widespread interest as an approach to tractable learning of complex modular behaviors. However, existing work either assume access to expert-constructed hierarchies, or use…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-19 Kurtland Chua , Qi Lei , Jason D. Lee