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When robots learn reward functions using high capacity models that take raw state directly as input, they need to both learn a representation for what matters in the task -- the task ``features" -- as well as how to combine these features…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-03-20 Andreea Bobu , Yi Liu , Rohin Shah , Daniel S. Brown , Anca D. Dragan

Reinforcement learning in complex environments is a challenging problem. In particular, the success of reinforcement learning algorithms depends on a well-designed reward function. Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) solves the problem of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-20 Rakhoon Hwang , Hanjin Lee , Hyung Ju Hwang

This paper explores multiple optimization methods to improve the performance of rating-based reinforcement learning (RbRL). RbRL, a method based on the idea of human ratings, has been developed to infer reward functions in reward-free…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-15 Evelyn Rose , Devin White , Mingkang Wu , Vernon Lawhern , Nicholas R. Waytowich , Yongcan Cao

Robots can learn the right reward function by querying a human expert. Existing approaches attempt to choose questions where the robot is most uncertain about the human's response; however, they do not consider how easy it will be for the…

Robotics · Computer Science 2019-10-11 Erdem Bıyık , Malayandi Palan , Nicholas C. Landolfi , Dylan P. Losey , Dorsa Sadigh

Large language models (LLMs) trained with Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities, but their underlying reward functions and decision-making processes remain opaque. This paper introduces…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Jared Joselowitz , Ritam Majumdar , Arjun Jagota , Matthieu Bou , Nyal Patel , Satyapriya Krishna , Sonali Parbhoo

In the physical world, people have dynamic preferences, e.g., the same situation can lead to satisfaction for some humans and to frustration for others. Personalization is called for. The same observation holds for online behavior with…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2017-08-16 Ziming Li , Julia Kiseleva , Maarten de Rijke , Artem Grotov

Recent years have witnessed many successful trials in the robot learning field. For contact-rich robotic tasks, it is challenging to learn coordinated motor skills by reinforcement learning. Imitation learning solves this problem by using a…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-11-02 Linqi Ye , Jiayi Li , Yi Cheng , Xianhao Wang , Bin Liang , Yan Peng

Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) is computationally challenging, with common approaches requiring the solution of multiple reinforcement learning (RL) sub-problems. This work motivates the use of potential-based reward shaping to reduce…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-19 Lauren H. Cooke , Harvey Klyne , Edwin Zhang , Cassidy Laidlaw , Milind Tambe , Finale Doshi-Velez

Reinforcement learning has been successful in training autonomous agents to accomplish goals in complex environments. Although this has been adapted to multiple settings, including robotics and computer games, human players often find it…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-01-22 Baicen Xiao , Qifan Lu , Bhaskar Ramasubramanian , Andrew Clark , Linda Bushnell , Radha Poovendran

Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) aims to learn a reward function and a corresponding policy that best fit the demonstrated trajectories of an expert. However, current IRL works cannot learn incrementally from an ongoing trajectory…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-24 Shicheng Liu , Minghui Zhu

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (\textbf{RLHF}) has emerged as a dominant approach for aligning LLM outputs with human preferences. Inspired by the success of RLHF, we study the performance of multiple algorithms that learn from…

As the demand for mobile robots continues to increase, social navigation has emerged as a critical task, driving active research into deep reinforcement learning (RL) approaches. However, because pedestrian dynamics and social conventions…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-04-10 Haruto Nagahisa , Kohei Matsumoto , Yuki Tomita , Yuki Hyodo , Ryo Kurazume

Exploration of indoor environments has recently experienced a significant interest, also thanks to the introduction of deep neural agents built in a hierarchical fashion and trained with Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) on simulated…

Reinforcement learning provides a powerful and general framework for decision making and control, but its application in practice is often hindered by the need for extensive feature and reward engineering. Deep reinforcement learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-08-15 Justin Fu , Katie Luo , Sergey Levine

Teaching large language models (LLMs) to reason during post-training typically relies on reinforcement learning with explicit outcome- or process-based reward functions. However, in many real-world settings, obtaining or defining such…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Claudio Fanconi , Nicolás Astorga , Mihaela van der Schaar

Explicit engineering of reward functions for given environments has been a major hindrance to reinforcement learning methods. While Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) is a solution to recover reward functions from demonstrations only,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-24 David Venuto , Jhelum Chakravorty , Leonard Boussioux , Junhao Wang , Gavin McCracken , Doina Precup

Exploration in environments with sparse rewards has been a persistent problem in reinforcement learning (RL). Many tasks are natural to specify with a sparse reward, and manually shaping a reward function can result in suboptimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-02-27 Ashvin Nair , Bob McGrew , Marcin Andrychowicz , Wojciech Zaremba , Pieter Abbeel

Deep reinforcement learning (RL) can acquire complex behaviors from low-level inputs, such as images. However, real-world applications of such methods require generalizing to the vast variability of the real world. Deep networks are known…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-03-13 Chelsea Finn , Tianhe Yu , Justin Fu , Pieter Abbeel , Sergey Levine

Reinforcement learning often suffer from the sparse reward issue in real-world robotics problems. Learning from demonstration (LfD) is an effective way to eliminate this problem, which leverages collected expert data to aid online learning.…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-03-09 Yanjiang Guo , Jingyue Gao , Zheng Wu , Chengming Shi , Jianyu Chen

Designing reward functions that generalize beyond controlled laboratory settings remains a fundamental challenge in reinforcement learning for robotics. In open-world manipulation problems, a single task can appear in numerous variants…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Tengye Xu , Yangting Sun , Ziju Shen , Guanqi Chen , Zhen Fu , Chen yizhou , Hua Chen , Jia Pan