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We consider a problem of learning the reward and policy from expert examples under unknown dynamics. Our proposed method builds on the framework of generative adversarial networks and introduces the empowerment-regularized maximum-entropy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-02-26 Ahmed H. Qureshi , Byron Boots , Michael C. Yip

Hierarchical reinforcement learning has been a compelling approach for achieving goal directed behavior over long sequences of actions. However, it has been challenging to implement in realistic or open-ended environments. A main challenge…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-22 Arun Ahuja , Kavya Kopparapu , Rob Fergus , Ishita Dasgupta

While recent progress in deep reinforcement learning has enabled robots to learn complex behaviors, tasks with long horizons and sparse rewards remain an ongoing challenge. In this work, we propose an effective reward shaping method through…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-04 Xingyu Lu , Stas Tiomkin , Pieter Abbeel

Self-paced reinforcement learning (RL) aims to improve the data efficiency of learning by automatically creating sequences, namely curricula, of probability distributions over contexts. However, existing techniques for self-paced RL fail in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-29 Cevahir Koprulu , Ufuk Topcu

We study the reward-free reinforcement learning framework, which is particularly suitable for batch reinforcement learning and scenarios where one needs policies for multiple reward functions. This framework has two phases. In the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-26 Zihan Zhang , Simon S. Du , Xiangyang Ji

Reinforcement learning (RL), a common tool in decision making, learns control policies from various experiences based on the associated cumulative return/rewards without treating them differently. Humans, on the contrary, often learn to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-25 Mingkang Wu , Devin White , Vernon Lawhern , Nicholas R. Waytowich , Yongcan Cao

Reinforcement learning has emerged as an important approach for autonomous driving. A reward function is used in reinforcement learning to establish the learned skill objectives and guide the agent toward the optimal policy. Since…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-03-05 Ahmed Abouelazm , Jonas Michel , J. Marius Zoellner

The ability to plan actions on multiple levels of abstraction enables intelligent agents to solve complex tasks effectively. However, learning the models for both low and high-level planning from demonstrations has proven challenging,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-05-30 Kalle Kujanpää , Joni Pajarinen , Alexander Ilin

One of the key challenges in applying reinforcement learning to real-life problems is that the amount of train-and-error required to learn a good policy increases drastically as the task becomes complex. One potential solution to this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-06-29 Kazeto Yamamoto , Takashi Onishi , Yoshimasa Tsuruoka

In this work, we investigate how implicit neural feed back can accelerate reinforcement learning in complex robotic manipulation settings. While prior electroencephalogram (EEG) guided reinforcement learning studies have primarily focused…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-11-25 Suzie Kim , Hye-Bin Shin , Hyo-Jeong Jang

Reinforcement-learning agents seek to maximize a reward signal through environmental interactions. As humans, our job in the learning process is to design reward functions to express desired behavior and enable the agent to learn such…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-08 Zhiyuan Zhou , Shreyas Sundara Raman , Henry Sowerby , Michael L. Littman

Recently there has been a proliferation of intrinsic motivation (IM) reward-shaping methods to learn in complex and sparse-reward environments. These methods can often inadvertently change the set of optimal policies in an environment,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-17 Grant C. Forbes , Leonardo Villalobos-Arias , Jianxun Wang , Arnav Jhala , David L. Roberts

Reward shaping allows reinforcement learning (RL) agents to accelerate learning by receiving additional reward signals. However, these signals can be difficult to design manually, especially for complex RL tasks. We propose a simple and…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-06-11 Niels Justesen , Sebastian Risi

Current reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) pipelines for large language model (LLM) alignment typically assign scalar rewards to sequences, using the final token as a surrogate indicator for the quality of the entire…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-24 Ryan Koo , Ian Yang , Vipul Raheja , Mingyi Hong , Kwang-Sung Jun , Dongyeop Kang

Chip placement is a critical step in physical design. While reinforcement learning (RL)-based methods have recently emerged, their training primarily focuses on wirelength optimization, and therefore often fail to achieve expert-quality…

Hardware Architecture · Computer Science 2026-04-29 Ruo-Tong Chen , Ke Xue , Chengrui Gao , Yunqi Shi , Tian Xu , Peng Xie , Siyuan Xu , Mingxuan Yuan , Chao Qian , Zhi-Hua Zhou

Reward design remains a significant bottleneck in applying reinforcement learning (RL) to real-world problems. A popular alternative is reward learning, where reward functions are inferred from human feedback rather than manually specified.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-16 Chaitanya Kharyal , Calarina Muslimani , Matthew E. Taylor

Reinforcement learning suffers from limitations in real practices primarily due to the number of required interactions with virtual environments. It results in a challenging problem because we are implausible to obtain a local optimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-28 Qizhen Wu , Kexin Liu , Lei Chen

Much of the current work on reinforcement learning studies episodic settings, where the agent is reset between trials to an initial state distribution, often with well-shaped reward functions. Non-episodic settings, where the agent must…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-23 John D. Co-Reyes , Suvansh Sanjeev , Glen Berseth , Abhishek Gupta , Sergey Levine

Reinforcement learning offers the promise of automating the acquisition of complex behavioral skills. However, compared to commonly used and well-understood supervised learning methods, reinforcement learning algorithms can be brittle,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-01 Aviral Kumar , Xue Bin Peng , Sergey Levine

Generating physical movement behaviours from their symbolic description is a long-standing challenge in artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics, requiring insights into numerical optimization methods as well as into formalizations from…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-12-19 Daniel Harnack , Christoph Lüth , Lukas Gross , Shivesh Kumar , Frank Kirchner