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Related papers: Reward Shaping with Subgoals for Social Navigation

200 papers

In order for autonomous mobile robots to navigate in human spaces, they must abide by our social norms. Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as an effective method to train sequential decision-making policies that are able to respect…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-03-01 Adam Sigal , Hsiu-Chin Lin , AJung Moon

In environments with sparse or delayed rewards, reinforcement learning (RL) incurs high sample complexity due to the large number of interactions needed for learning. This limitation has motivated the use of large language models (LLMs) for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-23 Narjes Nourzad , Carlee Joe-Wong

This work focuses on enhancing the generalization performance of deep reinforcement learning-based robot navigation in unseen environments. We present a novel data augmentation approach called scenario augmentation, which enables robots to…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Shanze Wang , Mingao Tan , Zhibo Yang , Xianghui Wang , Xiaoyu Shen , Hailong Huang , Wei Zhang

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-29 Nan Tang , Jing-Cheng Pang , Guanlin Li , Chao Qian , Yang Yu

As machine learning models become more capable, they have exhibited increased potential in solving complex tasks. One of the most promising directions uses deep reinforcement learning to train autonomous agents in computer network defense…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-23 Elizabeth Bates , Vasilios Mavroudis , Chris Hicks

Machine learning provides a powerful tool for building socially compliant robotic systems that go beyond simple predictive models of human behavior. By observing and understanding human interactions from past experiences, learning can…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-10-27 Noriaki Hirose , Dhruv Shah , Ajay Sridhar , Sergey Levine

Deep Reinforcement Learning is a promising tool for robotic control, yet practical application is often hindered by the difficulty of designing effective reward functions. Real-world tasks typically require optimizing multiple objectives…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-06 Kilian Freitag , Knut Åkesson , Morteza Haghir Chehreghani

The field of social robotics will likely need to depart from a paradigm of designed behaviours and imitation learning and adopt modern reinforcement learning (RL) methods to enable robots to interact fluidly and efficaciously with humans.…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-02-02 Thomas Kingsford

To perform robot manipulation tasks, a low-dimensional state of the environment typically needs to be estimated. However, designing a state estimator can sometimes be difficult, especially in environments with deformable objects. An…

Robotics · Computer Science 2019-07-16 Xingyu Lin , Harjatin Singh Baweja , David Held

We present a novel approach for image-goal navigation, where an agent navigates with a goal image rather than accurate target information, which is more challenging. Our goal is to decouple the learning of navigation goal planning,…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-02-23 Qiaoyun Wu , Jun Wang , Jing Liang , Xiaoxi Gong , Dinesh Manocha

In reinforcement learning (RL), sparse rewards are a natural way to specify the task to be learned. However, most RL algorithms struggle to learn in this setting since the learning signal is mostly zeros. In contrast, humans are good at…

Potential-based reward shaping provides an approach for designing good reward functions, with the purpose of speeding up learning. However, automatically finding potential functions for complex environments is a difficult problem (in fact,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-22 Martin Klissarov , Doina Precup

Robots need to be able to work in multiple different environments. Even when performing similar tasks, different behaviour should be deployed to best fit the current environment. In this paper, We propose a new approach to navigation, where…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-06-04 Xihan Bian , Oscar Mendez , Simon Hadfield

Reinforcement learning continuously optimizes decision-making based on real-time feedback reward signals through continuous interaction with the environment, demonstrating strong adaptive and self-learning capabilities. In recent years, it…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-08-15 Zixiang Wang , Hao Yan , Yining Wang , Zhengjia Xu , Zhuoyue Wang , Zhizhong Wu

Dealing with social tasks in robotic scenarios is difficult, as having humans in the learning loop is incompatible with most of the state-of-the-art machine learning algorithms. This is the case when exploring Incremental learning models,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-09-08 Janderson Ferreira , Agostinho A. F. Júnior , Letícia Castro , Yves M. Galvão , Pablo Barros , Bruno J. T. Fernandes

With the increasing presence of robots in our every-day environments, improving their social skills is of utmost importance. Nonetheless, social robotics still faces many challenges. One bottleneck is that robotic behaviors need to be often…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-08-08 Anand Ballou , Xavier Alameda-Pineda , Chris Reinke

This paper presents a reinforcement learning framework that incorporates a Contextual Reward Machine for task-oriented grasping. The Contextual Reward Machine reduces task complexity by decomposing grasping tasks into manageable sub-tasks.…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-12-12 Hui Li , Akhlak Uz Zaman , Fujian Yan , Hongsheng He

For a natural social human-robot interaction, it is essential for a robot to learn the human-like social skills. However, learning such skills is notoriously hard due to the limited availability of direct instructions from people to teach a…

Robotics · Computer Science 2018-04-17 Ahmed Hussain Qureshi , Yutaka Nakamura , Yuichiro Yoshikawa , Hiroshi Ishiguro

This paper investigates the application of reinforcement learning (RL) to multi-robot social formation navigation, a critical capability for enabling seamless human-robot coexistence. While RL offers a promising paradigm, the inherent…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-12-17 Hao Fu , Wei Liu , Shuai Zhou

This paper addresses the challenges of exploration and navigation in unknown environments from the perspective of evolutionary swarm robotics. A key focus is on path formation, which is essential for enabling cooperative swarm robots to…