Related papers: Quantifying Differences in Reward Functions
Designing an effective reward function has long been a challenge in reinforcement learning, particularly for complex tasks in unstructured environments. To address this, various learning paradigms have emerged that leverage different forms…
In many sequential decision making tasks, it is challenging to design reward functions that help an RL agent efficiently learn behavior that is considered good by the agent designer. A number of different formulations of the reward-design…
A key impediment to reinforcement learning (RL) in real applications with limited, batch data is defining a reward function that reflects what we implicitly know about reasonable behaviour for a task and allows for robust off-policy…
Preference-based reward learning is a popular technique for teaching robots and autonomous systems how a human user wants them to perform a task. Previous works have shown that actively synthesizing preference queries to maximize…
Progress in deep reinforcement learning (RL) research is largely enabled by benchmark task environments. However, analyzing the nature of those environments is often overlooked. In particular, we still do not have agreeable ways to measure…
In many reinforcement learning (RL) applications, augmenting the task rewards with heuristic rewards that encode human priors about how a task should be solved is crucial for achieving desirable performance. However, because such heuristics…
Imitation learning algorithms learn a policy from demonstrations of expert behavior. We show that, for deterministic experts, imitation learning can be done by reduction to reinforcement learning with a stationary reward. Our theoretical…
This article introduces an imitation learning method for learning maximum entropy policies that comply with constraints demonstrated by expert trajectories executing a task. The formulation of the method takes advantage of results…
Learning to control an environment without hand-crafted rewards or expert data remains challenging and is at the frontier of reinforcement learning research. We present an unsupervised learning algorithm to train agents to achieve…
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…
Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) addresses the problem of recovering a task description given a demonstration of the optimal policy used to solve such a task. The optimal policy is usually provided by an expert or teacher, making IRL…
In this paper we analyze the qualitative differences between evolutionary strategies and reinforcement learning algorithms by focusing on two popular state-of-the-art algorithms: the OpenAI-ES evolutionary strategy and the Proximal Policy…
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…
To learn directed behaviors in complex environments, intelligent agents need to optimize objective functions. Various objectives are known for designing artificial agents, including task rewards and intrinsic motivation. However, it is…
Inverse reinforcement learning is the problem of inferring a reward function from an optimal policy or demonstrations by an expert. In this work, it is assumed that the reward is expressed as a reward machine whose transitions depend on…
Observing a human demonstrator manipulate objects provides a rich, scalable and inexpensive source of data for learning robotic policies. However, transferring skills from human videos to a robotic manipulator poses several challenges, not…
In this paper, we study an inverse reinforcement learning problem that involves learning the reward function of a learning agent using trajectory data collected while this agent is learning its optimal policy. To address this problem, we…
We consider the problem of reinforcement learning when provided with (1) a baseline control policy and (2) a set of constraints that the learner must satisfy. The baseline policy can arise from demonstration data or a teacher agent and may…
The objective of many real-world tasks is complex and difficult to procedurally specify. This makes it necessary to use reward or imitation learning algorithms to infer a reward or policy directly from human data. Existing benchmarks for…
Learning about many things can provide numerous benefits to a reinforcement learning system. For example, learning many auxiliary value functions, in addition to optimizing the environmental reward, appears to improve both exploration and…