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Reward functions are central in reinforcement learning (RL), guiding agents towards optimal decision-making. The complexity of RL tasks requires meticulously designed reward functions that effectively drive learning while avoiding…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-31 Rati Devidze

Recent advancements in deep reinforcement learning (RL) have demonstrated notable progress in sample efficiency, spanning both model-based and model-free paradigms. Despite the identification and mitigation of specific bottlenecks in prior…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-02 Yibo Wang , Jiang Zhao

Reinforcement learning (RL) agents improve through trial-and-error, but when reward is sparse and the agent cannot discover successful action sequences, learning stagnates. This has been a notable problem in training deep RL agents to…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-02-27 Evan Zheran Liu , Kelvin Guu , Panupong Pasupat , Tianlin Shi , Percy Liang

Reinforcement learning (RL) in autonomous driving employs a trial-and-error mechanism, enhancing robustness in unpredictable environments. However, crafting effective reward functions remains challenging, as conventional approaches rely…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-02 Yongming Chen , Miner Chen , Liewen Liao , Mingyang Jiang , Xiang Zuo , Hengrui Zhang , Yuchen Xi , Songan Zhang

Efficient exploration is necessary to achieve good sample efficiency for reinforcement learning in general. From small, tabular settings such as gridworlds to large, continuous and sparse reward settings such as robotic object manipulation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-20 Zhaohan Daniel Guo , Emma Brunskill

In this paper, we present empirical evidence of skills and directed exploration emerging from a simple RL algorithm long before any successful trials are observed. For example, in a manipulation task, the agent is given a single observation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-13 Grace Liu , Michael Tang , Benjamin Eysenbach

Conventionally, model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) aims to learn a global model for the dynamics of the environment. A good model can potentially enable planning algorithms to generate a large variety of behaviors and solve diverse…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-18 Archit Sharma , Shixiang Gu , Sergey Levine , Vikash Kumar , Karol Hausman

Reinforcement learning plays a crucial role in vehicle control by guiding agents to learn optimal control strategies through designing or learning appropriate reward signals. However, in vehicle control applications, rewards typically need…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-21 Jielong Yang , Daoyuan Huang

Reinforcement learning (RL) is an effective approach to motion planning in autonomous driving, where an optimal driving policy can be automatically learned using the interaction data with the environment. Nevertheless, the reward function…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-08-28 Lin-Chi Wu , Zengjie Zhang , Sofie Haesaert , Zhiqiang Ma , Zhiyong Sun

Many real-world reinforcement learning (RL) problems necessitate learning complex, temporally extended behavior that may only receive reward signal when the behavior is completed. If the reward-worthy behavior is known, it can be specified…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-10 Phillip J. K. Christoffersen , Andrew C. Li , Rodrigo Toro Icarte , Sheila A. McIlraith

Model-based next state prediction and state value prediction are slow to converge. To address these challenges, we do the following: i) Instead of a neural network, we do model-based planning using a parallel memory retrieval system (which…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-02-02 John Chong Min Tan , Mehul Motani

We propose an exploration method that incorporates look-ahead search over basic learnt skills and their dynamics, and use it for reinforcement learning (RL) of manipulation policies . Our skills are multi-goal policies learned in isolation…

Robotics · Computer Science 2018-11-21 Arpit Agarwal , Katharina Muelling , Katerina Fragkiadaki

Designing reliable decision strategies for autonomous urban driving is challenging. Reinforcement learning (RL) has been used to automatically derive suitable behavior in uncertain environments, but it does not provide any guarantee on the…

Reinforcement learning methods require careful design involving a reward function to obtain the desired action policy for a given task. In the absence of hand-crafted reward functions, prior work on the topic has proposed several methods…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-10-16 Daiki Kimura , Subhajit Chaudhury , Ryuki Tachibana , Sakyasingha Dasgupta

In reinforcement learning, the graph Laplacian has proved to be a valuable tool in the task-agnostic setting, with applications ranging from skill discovery to reward shaping. Recently, learning the Laplacian representation has been framed…

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a general framework concerned with an agent that seeks to maximize rewards in an environment. The learning typically happens through trial and error using explorative methods, such as epsilon-greedy. There are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-06 Per-Arne Andersen , Morten Goodwin , Ole-Christoffer Granmo

Reinforcement learning (RL) plays a major role in solving complex sequential decision-making tasks. Hierarchical and goal-conditioned RL are promising methods for dealing with two major problems in RL, namely sample inefficiency and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-11 Amirhossein Mesbah , Reshad Hosseini , Seyed Pooya Shariatpanahi , Majid Nili Ahmadabadi

In this paper, we explore an approach to auxiliary task discovery in reinforcement learning based on ideas from representation learning. Auxiliary tasks tend to improve data efficiency by forcing the agent to learn auxiliary prediction and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-23 Banafsheh Rafiee , Sina Ghiassian , Jun Jin , Richard Sutton , Jun Luo , Adam White

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

The objective of a reinforcement learning agent is to behave so as to maximise the sum of a suitable scalar function of state: the reward. These rewards are typically given and immutable. In this paper, we instead consider the proposition…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-08-25 Zeyu Zheng , Junhyuk Oh , Matteo Hessel , Zhongwen Xu , Manuel Kroiss , Hado van Hasselt , David Silver , Satinder Singh