Related papers: Quantifying Differences in Reward Functions
To widen their accessibility and increase their utility, intelligent agents must be able to learn complex behaviors as specified by (non-expert) human users. Moreover, they will need to learn these behaviors within a reasonable amount of…
While Reinforcement Learning (RL) aims to train an agent from a reward function in a given environment, Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) seeks to recover the reward function from observing an expert's behavior. It is well known that, in…
Many popular practical reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms employ evolving reward functions-through techniques such as reward shaping, entropy regularization, or curriculum learning-yet their theoretical foundations remain…
Standard reinforcement learning methods aim to master one way of solving a task whereas there may exist multiple near-optimal policies. Being able to identify this collection of near-optimal policies can allow a domain expert to efficiently…
Many robotic tasks are composed of a lot of temporally correlated sub-tasks in a highly complex environment. It is important to discover situational intentions and proper actions by deliberating on temporal abstractions to solve problems…
Existing approaches to algorithmic fairness aim to ensure equitable outcomes if human decision-makers comply perfectly with algorithmic decisions. However, perfect compliance with the algorithm is rarely a reality or even a desirable…
Designing reward functions for efficiently guiding reinforcement learning (RL) agents toward specific behaviors is a complex task. This is challenging since it requires the identification of reward structures that are not sparse and that…
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…
Enabling autonomous robots to interact in unstructured environments with dynamic objects requires manipulation capabilities that can deal with clutter, changes, and objects' variability. This paper presents a comparison of different…
In toxicology research, experiments are often conducted to determine the effect of toxicant exposure on the behavior of mice, where mice are randomized to receive the toxicant or not. In particular, in fixed interval experiments, one…
For many applications of reinforcement learning it can be more convenient to specify both a reward function and constraints, rather than trying to design behavior through the reward function. For example, systems that physically interact…
We consider off-policy policy evaluation with function approximation (FA) in average-reward MDPs, where the goal is to estimate both the reward rate and the differential value function. For this problem, bootstrapping is necessary and,…
Interactive-Grounded Learning (IGL) [Xie et al., 2021] is a powerful framework in which a learner aims at maximizing unobservable rewards through interacting with an environment and observing reward-dependent feedback on the taken actions.…
Robotic grasping is a crucial area of research as it can result in the acceleration of the automation of several Industries utilizing robots ranging from manufacturing to healthcare. Reinforcement learning is the field of study where an…
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…
Reinforcement learning for embodied agents is a challenging problem. The accumulated reward to be optimized is often a very rugged function, and gradient methods are impaired by many local optimizers. We demonstrate, in an experimental…
Consider learning an imitation policy on the basis of demonstrated behavior from multiple environments, with an eye towards deployment in an unseen environment. Since the observable features from each setting may be different, directly…
Imitation learning has enabled robots to perform complex, long-horizon tasks in challenging dexterous manipulation settings. As new methods are developed, they must be rigorously evaluated and compared against corresponding baselines…
In this work, we provide theoretical guarantees for reward decomposition in deterministic MDPs. Reward decomposition is a special case of Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning, that allows one to learn many policies in parallel and combine…
Explainable AI techniques that describe agent reward functions can enhance human-robot collaboration in a variety of settings. One context where human understanding of agent reward functions is particularly beneficial is in the value…