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Data generation and labeling are usually an expensive part of learning for robotics. While active learning methods are commonly used to tackle the former problem, preference-based learning is a concept that attempts to solve the latter by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-10-11 Erdem Bıyık , Dorsa Sadigh

Exogenous state variables and rewards can slow reinforcement learning by injecting uncontrolled variation into the reward signal. This paper formalizes exogenous state variables and rewards and shows that if the reward function decomposes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-15 George Trimponias , Thomas G. Dietterich

The history of learning for control has been an exciting back and forth between two broad classes of algorithms: planning and reinforcement learning. Planning algorithms effectively reason over long horizons, but assume access to a local…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2019-06-13 Benjamin Eysenbach , Ruslan Salakhutdinov , Sergey Levine

Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning (HRL) exploits temporally extended actions, or options, to make decisions from a higher-dimensional perspective to alleviate the sparse reward problem, one of the most challenging problems in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-15 Libo Xing

Preference-based learning of reward functions, where the reward function is learned using comparison data, has been well studied for complex robotic tasks such as autonomous driving. Existing algorithms have focused on learning reward…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-03-05 Sydney M. Katz , Amir Maleki , Erdem Bıyık , Mykel J. Kochenderfer

Learning to solve complex goal-oriented tasks with sparse terminal-only rewards often requires an enormous number of samples. In such cases, using a set of expert trajectories could help to learn faster. However, Imitation Learning (IL) via…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-19 Sujoy Paul , Jeroen van Baar , Amit K. Roy-Chowdhury

Reward shaping is critical in reinforcement learning (RL), particularly for complex tasks where sparse rewards can hinder learning. However, choosing effective shaping rewards from a set of reward functions in a computationally efficient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-26 Chen Bo Calvin Zhang , Zhang-Wei Hong , Aldo Pacchiano , Pulkit Agrawal

Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms suffer from the dependency on accurately engineered reward functions to properly guide the learning agents to do the required tasks. Preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL) addresses that by…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-08-23 Youssef Abdelkareem , Shady Shehata , Fakhri Karray

Learning instead of designing robot controllers can greatly reduce engineering effort required, while also emphasizing robustness. Despite considerable progress in simulation, applying learning directly in hardware is still challenging, in…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-03-07 Steve Heim , Felix Ruppert , Alborz A. Sarvestani , Alexander Spröwitz

This paper proposes a design scheme of reward function that constantly evaluates both driving states and actions for applying reinforcement learning to automated driving. In the field of reinforcement learning, reward functions often…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-03-24 Takeru Goto , Yuki Kizumi , Shun Iwasaki

Recent reinforcement learning (RL) approaches have shown strong performance in complex domains such as Atari games, but are often highly sample inefficient. A common approach to reduce interaction time with the environment is to use reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-03 Prasoon Goyal , Scott Niekum , Raymond J. Mooney

Model-free reinforcement learning algorithms have exhibited great potential in solving single-task sequential decision-making problems with high-dimensional observations and long horizons, but are known to be hard to generalize across…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-30 Boyuan Chen , Chuning Zhu , Pulkit Agrawal , Kaiqing Zhang , Abhishek Gupta

In reinforcement learning, reward shaping is an efficient way to guide the learning process of an agent, as the reward can indicate the optimal policy of the task. The potential-based reward shaping framework was proposed to guarantee…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-02-08 Yifei Chen , Lambert Schomaker , Francisco Cruz

We introduce the framework of performative reinforcement learning where the policy chosen by the learner affects the underlying reward and transition dynamics of the environment. Following the recent literature on performative…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-08 Debmalya Mandal , Stelios Triantafyllou , Goran Radanovic

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

Reinforcement learning has shown promise in learning policies that can solve complex problems. However, manually specifying a good reward function can be difficult, especially for intricate tasks. Inverse reinforcement learning offers a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-11-28 Peter Henderson , Wei-Di Chang , Pierre-Luc Bacon , David Meger , Joelle Pineau , Doina Precup

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a popular approach for robotic path planning in uncertain environments. However, the control policies trained for an RL agent crucially depend on user-defined, state-based reward functions. Poorly designed…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-12-05 Anand Balakrishnan , Stefan Jakšić , Edgar A. Aguilar , Dejan Ničković , Jyotirmoy V. Deshmukh

Reinforcement Learning has emerged as a strong alternative to solve optimization tasks efficiently. The use of these algorithms highly depends on the feedback signals provided by the environment in charge of informing about how good (or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-01 Alain Andres , Esther Villar-Rodriguez , Javier Del Ser

Crowd simulation is important for video-games design, since it enables to populate virtual worlds with autonomous avatars that navigate in a human-like manner. Reinforcement learning has shown great potential in simulating virtual crowds,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-25 Ariel Kwiatkowski , Vicky Kalogeiton , Julien Pettré , Marie-Paule Cani

Reinforcement learning (RL) has shown to be a valuable tool in training neural networks for autonomous motion planning. The application of RL to a specific problem is dependent on a reward signal to quantify how good or bad a certain action…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-10-28 Benjamin Evans , Herman A. Engelbrecht , Hendrik W. Jordaan