Related papers: Foresee then Evaluate: Decomposing Value Estimatio…
Learning a predictive model of the mean return, or value function, plays a critical role in many reinforcement learning algorithms. Distributional reinforcement learning (DRL) has been shown to improve performance by modeling the value…
Solving a reinforcement learning (RL) problem poses two competing challenges: fitting a potentially discontinuous value function, and generalizing well to new observations. In this paper, we analyze the learning dynamics of temporal…
Reinforcement learning (RL) with sparse and deceptive rewards is challenging because non-zero rewards are rarely obtained. Hence, the gradient calculated by the agent can be stochastic and without valid information. Recent studies that…
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…
Reward and representation learning are two long-standing challenges for learning an expanding set of robot manipulation skills from sensory observations. Given the inherent cost and scarcity of in-domain, task-specific robot data, learning…
Reward design remains a critical bottleneck in visual reinforcement learning (RL) for robotic manipulation. In simulated environments, rewards are conventionally designed based on the distance to a target position. However, such precise…
Training agents via off-policy deep reinforcement learning (RL) requires a large memory, named replay memory, that stores past experiences used for learning. These experiences are sampled, uniformly or non-uniformly, to create the batches…
Reinforcement learning (RL) with continuous time and state/action spaces is often data-intensive and brittle under nuisance variability and shift, motivating methods that exploit value-preserving structures to stabilize and improve…
Feature selection in reinforcement learning (RL), i.e. choosing basis functions such that useful approximations of the unkown value function can be obtained, is one of the main challenges in scaling RL to real-world applications. Here we…
In offline reinforcement learning (RL), learning from fixed datasets presents a promising solution for domains where real-time interaction with the environment is expensive or risky. However, designing dense reward signals for offline…
We propose VRAIL (Vectorized Reward-based Attribution for Interpretable Learning), a bi-level framework for value-based reinforcement learning (RL) that learns interpretable weight representations from state features. VRAIL consists of two…
Reasoning about the future -- understanding how decisions in the present time affect outcomes in the future -- is one of the central challenges for reinforcement learning (RL), especially in highly-stochastic or partially observable…
Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) describes the problem of learning an unknown reward function of a Markov Decision Process (MDP) from observed behavior of an agent. Since the agent's behavior originates in its policy and MDP policies…
We propose an actor-critic, model-free, and online Reinforcement Learning (RL) framework for continuous-state continuous-action Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) when the reward is highly sparse but encompasses a high-level temporal…
In visual Reinforcement Learning (RL), upstream representation learning largely determines the effect of downstream policy learning. Employing auxiliary tasks allows the agent to enhance visual representation in a targeted manner, thereby…
An emerging field of sequential decision problems is safe Reinforcement Learning (RL), where the objective is to maximize the reward while obeying safety constraints. Being able to handle constraints is essential for deploying RL agents in…
We consider real-world reinforcement learning (RL) of robotic manipulation tasks that involve both visuomotor skills and contact-rich skills. We aim to train a policy that maps multimodal sensory observations (vision and force) to a…
Many continuous control problems can be formulated as sparse-reward reinforcement learning (RL) tasks. In principle, online RL methods can automatically explore the state space to solve each new task. However, discovering sequences of…
Learning good representations of historical contexts is one of the core challenges of reinforcement learning (RL) in partially observable environments. While self-predictive auxiliary tasks have been shown to improve performance in fully…
Transfer in Reinforcement Learning aims to improve learning performance on target tasks using knowledge from experienced source tasks. Successor Representations (SR) and their extension Successor Features (SF) are prominent transfer…