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Intelligent agents rely heavily on prior experience when learning a new task, yet most modern reinforcement learning (RL) approaches learn every task from scratch. One approach for leveraging prior knowledge is to transfer skills learned on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-23 Karl Pertsch , Youngwoon Lee , Joseph J. Lim

In reinforcement learning, we typically refer to unsupervised pre-training when we aim to pre-train a policy without a priori access to the task specification, i.e. rewards, to be later employed for efficient learning of downstream tasks.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Riccardo Zamboni , Mirco Mutti , Marcello Restelli

Agentic reinforcement learning (RL) for Large Language Models (LLMs) critically depends on the exploration capability of the base policy, as training signals emerge only within its in-capability region. For tasks where the base policy…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Yuxiang Ji , Zengbin Wang , Yong Wang , Shidong Yang , Ziyu Ma , Guanhua Chen , Zonghua Sun , Liaoni Wu , Xiangxiang Chu

Key challenges for the deployment of reinforcement learning (RL) agents in the real world are the discovery, representation and reuse of skills in the absence of a reward function. To this end, we propose a novel approach to learn a…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2020-02-07 Oier Mees , Markus Merklinger , Gabriel Kalweit , Wolfram Burgard

Reinforcement learning in partially observable environments is typically challenging, as it requires agents to learn an estimate of the underlying system state. These challenges are exacerbated in multi-agent settings, where agents learn…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-04-14 Paul J. Pritz , Kin K. Leung

In a Human-in-the-Loop paradigm, a robotic agent is able to act mostly autonomously in solving a task, but can request help from an external expert when needed. However, knowing when to request such assistance is critical: too few requests…

The central tenet of reinforcement learning (RL) is that agents seek to maximize the sum of cumulative rewards. In contrast, active inference, an emerging framework within cognitive and computational neuroscience, proposes that agents act…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-02 Alexander Tschantz , Beren Millidge , Anil K. Seth , Christopher L. Buckley

Pre-training Reinforcement Learning agents in a task-agnostic manner has shown promising results. However, previous works still struggle in learning and discovering meaningful skills in high-dimensional state-spaces, such as pixel-spaces.…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-07-20 Juan José Nieto , Roger Creus , Xavier Giro-i-Nieto

Exploration in environments with sparse rewards has been a persistent problem in reinforcement learning (RL). Many tasks are natural to specify with a sparse reward, and manually shaping a reward function can result in suboptimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-02-27 Ashvin Nair , Bob McGrew , Marcin Andrychowicz , Wojciech Zaremba , Pieter Abbeel

Reinforcement learning (RL) has been widely used in text generation to alleviate the exposure bias issue or to utilize non-parallel datasets. The reward function plays an important role in making RL training successful. However, previous…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-19 Yongchang Hao , Yuxin Liu , Lili Mou

Unsupervised skill discovery aims to learn diverse and distinguishable behaviors in open-ended reinforcement learning. For existing methods, they focus on improving diversity through pure exploration, mutual information optimization, and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-27 He Zhang , Ming Zhou , Shaopeng Zhai , Ying Sun , Hui Xiong

Reinforcement learning is a powerful technique to train an agent to perform a task. However, an agent that is trained using reinforcement learning is only capable of achieving the single task that is specified via its reward function. Such…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-07-24 Carlos Florensa , David Held , Xinyang Geng , Pieter Abbeel

Reinforcement learning has shown great promise in robotics thanks to its ability to develop efficient robotic control procedures through self-training. In particular, reinforcement learning has been successfully applied to solving the…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-11-12 Pierre Aumjaud , David McAuliffe , Francisco Javier Rodríguez Lera , Philip Cardiff

Providing a suitable reward function to reinforcement learning can be difficult in many real world applications. While inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) holds promise for automatically learning reward functions from demonstrations,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-29 Lantao Yu , Tianhe Yu , Chelsea Finn , Stefano Ermon

The emergence of reinforcement learning (RL) methods in traffic signal control tasks has achieved better performance than conventional rule-based approaches. Most RL approaches require the observation of the environment for the agent to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-16 Hao Mei , Junxian Li , Bin Shi , Hua Wei

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…

Reinforcement Learning (RL) and Imitation Learning (IL) have made great progress in robotic decision-making in recent years. However, these methods show obvious deterioration for new tasks that need to be completed through new combinations…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-04-29 Xianqi Zhang , Xingtao Wang , Xu Liu , Wenrui Wang , Xiaopeng Fan , Debin Zhao

Autonomous learning of robotic skills can allow general-purpose robots to learn wide behavioral repertoires without requiring extensive manual engineering. However, robotic skill learning methods typically make one of several trade-offs to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-10-07 William Montgomery , Anurag Ajay , Chelsea Finn , Pieter Abbeel , Sergey Levine

This research focuses on enhancing reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms by integrating penalty functions to guide agents in avoiding unwanted actions while optimizing rewards. The goal is to improve the learning process by ensuring that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-07 Sai Gana Sandeep Pula , Sathish A. P. Kumar , Sumit Jha , Arvind Ramanathan

When deploying autonomous agents in the real world, we need effective ways of communicating objectives to them. Traditional skill learning has revolved around reinforcement and imitation learning, each with rigid constraints on the format…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2019-11-21 Mark Woodward , Chelsea Finn , Karol Hausman