Related papers: Guided Exploration with Proximal Policy Optimizati…
Reinforcement learning methods for continuous control tasks have evolved in recent years generating a family of policy gradient methods that rely primarily on a Gaussian distribution for modeling a stochastic policy. However, the Gaussian…
This paper focuses on a class of reinforcement learning problems where significant events are rare and limited to a single positive reward per episode. A typical example is that of an agent who has to choose a partner to cooperate with,…
We investigate the task of learning to follow natural language instructions by jointly reasoning with visual observations and language inputs. In contrast to existing methods which start with learning from demonstrations (LfD) and then use…
We develop a simple framework to learn bio-inspired foraging policies using human data. We conduct an experiment where humans are virtually immersed in an open field foraging environment and are trained to collect the highest amount of…
Effective exploration in reinforcement learning requires not only tracking where an agent has been, but also understanding how the agent perceives and represents the world. To learn powerful representations, an agent should actively explore…
We consider a class of reinforcement-learning systems in which the agent follows a behavior policy to explore a discrete state-action space to find an optimal policy while adhering to some restriction on its behavior. Such restriction may…
Exploration is a key problem in reinforcement learning, since agents can only learn from data they acquire in the environment. With that in mind, maintaining a population of agents is an attractive method, as it allows data be collected…
Incorporating prior knowledge in reinforcement learning algorithms is mainly an open question. Even when insights about the environment dynamics are available, reinforcement learning is traditionally used in a tabula rasa setting and must…
Reward engineering and designing an incentive reward function are non-trivial tasks to train agents in complex environments. Furthermore, an inaccurate reward function may lead to a biased behaviour which is far from an efficient and…
A major challenge in real-world reinforcement learning (RL) is the sparsity of reward feedback. Often, what is available is an intuitive but sparse reward function that only indicates whether the task is completed partially or fully.…
A precondition for the deployment of a Reinforcement Learning agent to a real-world system is to provide guarantees on the learning process. While a learning algorithm will eventually converge to a good policy, there are no guarantees on…
Solving tasks in Reinforcement Learning is no easy feat. As the goal of the agent is to maximize the accumulated reward, it often learns to exploit loopholes and misspecifications in the reward signal resulting in unwanted behavior. While…
Deep reinforcement learning methods traditionally struggle with tasks where environment rewards are particularly sparse. One successful method of guiding exploration in these domains is to imitate trajectories provided by a human…
The exploration-exploitation dilemma has been an intriguing and unsolved problem within the framework of reinforcement learning. "Optimism in the face of uncertainty" and model building play central roles in advanced exploration methods.…
What is a good exploration strategy for an agent that interacts with an environment in the absence of external rewards? Ideally, we would like to get a policy driving towards a uniform state-action visitation (highly exploring) in a minimum…
Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) is a highly popular model-free reinforcement learning (RL) approach. However, we observe that in a continuous action space, PPO can prematurely shrink the exploration variance, which leads to slow progress…
A key challenge in reinforcement learning (RL) is managing the exploration-exploitation trade-off without sacrificing sample efficiency. Policy gradient (PG) methods excel in exploitation through fine-grained, gradient-based optimization…
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…
Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) algorithms often require a large amount of data and struggle in sparse-reward domains with long planning horizons and multiple sub-goals. In this paper, we propose a neuro-symbolic extension of Proximal…
In this article, we explore the feasibility of applying proximal policy optimization, a state-of-the-art deep reinforcement learning algorithm for continuous control tasks, on the dual-objective problem of controlling an underactuated…