Related papers: Adapting to Reward Progressivity via Spectral Rein…
Future reward estimation is a core component of reinforcement learning agents; i.e., Q-value and state-value functions, predicting an agent's sum of future rewards. Their scalar output, however, obfuscates when or what individual future…
Successfully navigating a complex environment to obtain a desired outcome is a difficult task, that up to recently was believed to be capable only by humans. This perception has been broken down over time, especially with the introduction…
Efficient exploration in complex environments remains a major challenge for reinforcement learning. We propose bootstrapped DQN, a simple algorithm that explores in a computationally and statistically efficient manner through use of…
Delayed and sparse rewards present a fundamental obstacle for reinforcement-learning (RL) agents, which struggle to assign credit for actions whose benefits emerge many steps later. The sliding-tile game 2048 epitomizes this challenge:…
Deep reinforcement learning agents have achieved state-of-the-art results by directly maximising cumulative reward. However, environments contain a much wider variety of possible training signals. In this paper, we introduce an agent that…
Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has shown its promising capabilities to learn optimal policies directly from trial and error. However, learning can be hindered if the goal of the learning, defined by the reward function, is "not optimal".…
In the last decade, deep learning has achieved great success in machine learning tasks where the input data is represented with different levels of abstractions. Driven by the recent research in reinforcement learning using deep neural…
Over the past decade, remarkable progress has been made in adopting deep neural networks to enhance the performance of conventional reinforcement learning. A notable milestone was the development of Deep Q-Networks (DQN), which achieved…
Learning continuous control in high-dimensional sparse reward settings, such as robotic manipulation, is a challenging problem due to the number of samples often required to obtain accurate optimal value and policy estimates. While many…
Rewards play an essential role in reinforcement learning. In contrast to rule-based game environments with well-defined reward functions, complex real-world robotic applications, such as contact-rich manipulation, lack explicit and…
Goals for reinforcement learning problems are typically defined through hand-specified rewards. To design such problems, developers of learning algorithms must inherently be aware of what the task goals are, yet we often require agents to…
Most of the recent deep reinforcement learning advances take an RL-centric perspective and focus on refinements of the training objective. We diverge from this view and show we can recover the performance of these developments not by…
Deep reinforcement learning has proven remarkably useful in training agents from unstructured data. However, the opacity of the produced agents makes it difficult to ensure that they adhere to various requirements posed by human engineers.…
Many reinforcement learning (RL) tasks have specific properties that can be leveraged to modify existing RL algorithms to adapt to those tasks and further improve performance, and a general class of such properties is the multiple reward…
Scaling issues are mundane yet irritating for practitioners of reinforcement learning. Error scales vary across domains, tasks, and stages of learning; sometimes by many orders of magnitude. This can be detrimental to learning speed and…
Deep reinforcement learning in partially observable environments is a difficult task in itself, and can be further complicated by a sparse reward signal. Most tasks involving navigation in three-dimensional environments provide the agent…
Reinforcement learning usually makes use of numerical rewards, which have nice properties but also come with drawbacks and difficulties. Using rewards on an ordinal scale (ordinal rewards) is an alternative to numerical rewards that has…
Multi-agent reinforcement learning has drawn increasing attention in practice, e.g., robotics and automatic driving, as it can explore optimal policies using samples generated by interacting with the environment. However, high reward…
(This work has been submitted to the IEEE for possible publication. Copyright may be transferred without notice, after which this version may no longer be accessible.) To improve the efficiency of deep reinforcement learning (DRL)-based…
Learning goal-directed behavior in environments with sparse feedback is a major challenge for reinforcement learning algorithms. The primary difficulty arises due to insufficient exploration, resulting in an agent being unable to learn…