Related papers: Environment Shaping in Reinforcement Learning usin…
Reinforcement learning is commonly concerned with problems of maximizing accumulated rewards in Markov decision processes. Oftentimes, a certain goal state or a subset of the state space attain maximal reward. In such a case, the…
Learning to solve sparse-reward reinforcement learning problems is difficult, due to the lack of guidance towards the goal. But in some problems, prior knowledge can be used to augment the learning process. Reward shaping is a way to…
There has been significant progress in deep reinforcement learning (RL) in recent years. Nevertheless, finding suitable hyperparameter configurations and reward functions remains challenging even for experts, and performance heavily relies…
Learning a policy capable of moving an agent between any two states in the environment is important for many robotics problems involving navigation and manipulation. Due to the sparsity of rewards in such tasks, applying reinforcement…
Model-based reinforcement learning methods typically learn models for high-dimensional state spaces by aiming to reconstruct and predict the original observations. However, drawing inspiration from model-free reinforcement learning, we…
We consider an extended notion of reinforcement learning in which the environment can simulate the agent and base its outputs on the agent's hypothetical behavior. Since good performance usually requires paying attention to whatever things…
Reinforcement learning algorithms typically necessitate extensive exploration of the state space to find optimal policies. However, in safety-critical applications, the risks associated with such exploration can lead to catastrophic…
In typical reinforcement learning (RL), the environment is assumed given and the goal of the learning is to identify an optimal policy for the agent taking actions through its interactions with the environment. In this paper, we extend this…
Recent studies show that deep reinforcement learning (DRL) agents tend to overfit to the task on which they were trained and fail to adapt to minor environment changes. To expedite learning when transferring to unseen tasks, we propose a…
This paper presents a reinforcement learning framework that incorporates a Contextual Reward Machine for task-oriented grasping. The Contextual Reward Machine reduces task complexity by decomposing grasping tasks into manageable sub-tasks.…
A promising technique for exploration is to maximize the entropy of visited state distribution, i.e., state entropy, by encouraging uniform coverage of visited state space. While it has been effective for an unsupervised setup, it tends to…
Reward shaping (RS) is a powerful method in reinforcement learning (RL) for overcoming the problem of sparse or uninformative rewards. However, RS typically relies on manually engineered shaping-reward functions whose construction is…
Real-world sequential decision-making often involves parameterized action spaces that require both, decisions regarding discrete actions and decisions about continuous action parameters governing how an action is executed. Existing…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) suffers from sample inefficiency in sparse reward domains, and the problem is further pronounced in case of stochastic transitions. To improve the sample efficiency, reward shaping is a well-studied approach to…
We investigate the effect of reward shaping in improving the performance of reinforcement learning in the context of the real-time strategy, capture-the-flag game. The game is characterized by sparse rewards that are associated with…
Empowerment quantifies the influence an agent has on its environment. This is formally achieved by the maximum of the expected KL-divergence between the distribution of the successor state conditioned on a specific action and a distribution…
In reinforcement learning, an agent interacts sequentially with an environment to maximize a reward, receiving only partial, probabilistic feedback. This creates a fundamental exploration-exploitation trade-off: the agent must explore to…
Exploration is an extremely challenging problem in reinforcement learning, especially in high dimensional state and action spaces and when only sparse rewards are available. Effective representations can indicate which components of the…
Agents that can learn to imitate given video observation -- \emph{without direct access to state or action information} are more applicable to learning in the natural world. However, formulating a reinforcement learning (RL) agent that…
Model-based Reinforcement Learning approaches have the promise of being sample efficient. Much of the progress in learning dynamics models in RL has been made by learning models via supervised learning. But traditional model-based…