English
Related papers

Related papers: HAC Explore: Accelerating Exploration with Hierarc…

200 papers

Finding meaningful and accurate dense rewards is a fundamental task in the field of reinforcement learning (RL) that enables agents to explore environments more efficiently. In traditional RL settings, agents learn optimal policies through…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-05 Shuyuan Zhang

Open-ended learning benefits immensely from the use of symbolic methods for goal representation as they offer ways to structure knowledge for efficient and transferable learning. However, the existing Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-15 Mehdi Zadem , Sergio Mover , Sao Mai Nguyen

Solving long-horizon goal-conditioned tasks remains a significant challenge in reinforcement learning (RL). Hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) addresses this by decomposing tasks into more manageable sub-tasks, but the automatic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-09 Yang Yu

We study reward models for long-horizon manipulation tasks by learning from action-free videos and language instructions, which we term the visual-instruction correlation (VIC) problem. Recent advancements in cross-modality modeling have…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-02-21 Kuo-Han Hung , Pang-Chi Lo , Jia-Fong Yeh , Han-Yuan Hsu , Yi-Ting Chen , Winston H. Hsu

We introduce Random Reward Perturbation (RRP), a novel exploration strategy for reinforcement learning (RL). Our theoretical analyses demonstrate that adding zero-mean noise to environmental rewards effectively enhances policy diversity…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-11 Haozhe Ma , Guoji Fu , Zhengding Luo , Jiele Wu , Tze-Yun Leong

Hierarchical reinforcement learning is a promising approach to tackle long-horizon decision-making problems with sparse rewards. Unfortunately, most methods still decouple the lower-level skill acquisition process and the training of a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-05-15 Alexander C. Li , Carlos Florensa , Ignasi Clavera , Pieter Abbeel

In spite of the success of existing meta reinforcement learning methods, they still have difficulty in learning a meta policy effectively for RL problems with sparse reward. In this respect, we develop a novel meta reinforcement learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-08 Yun Hua , Xiangfeng Wang , Bo Jin , Wenhao Li , Junchi Yan , Xiaofeng He , Hongyuan Zha

Dealing with sparse rewards is a longstanding challenge in reinforcement learning. The recent use of hindsight methods have achieved success on a variety of sparse-reward tasks, but they fail on complex tasks such as stacking multiple…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-11 John B. Lanier , Stephen McAleer , Pierre Baldi

Effective agent exploration remains a core challenge in reinforcement learning (RL) for complex discrete state-space environments, particularly under partial observability. This paper presents a decoupled hierarchical RL framework…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-04 Qingyu Xiao , Yuanlin Chang , Youtian Du

Realistic environments often provide agents with very limited feedback. When the environment is initially unknown, the feedback, in the beginning, can be completely absent, and the agents may first choose to devote all their effort on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-13 Pierre Ménard , Omar Darwiche Domingues , Anders Jonsson , Emilie Kaufmann , Edouard Leurent , Michal Valko

Reinforcement learning can train policies that effectively perform complex tasks. However for long-horizon tasks, the performance of these methods degrades with horizon, often necessitating reasoning over and chaining lower-level skills.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-31 Dhruv Shah , Peng Xu , Yao Lu , Ted Xiao , Alexander Toshev , Sergey Levine , Brian Ichter

Many continuous control tasks have easily formulated objectives, yet using them directly as a reward in reinforcement learning (RL) leads to suboptimal policies. Therefore, many classical control tasks guide RL training using complex…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-21 Aleksandra Faust , Anthony Francis , Dar Mehta

Learning an optimal policy from a multi-modal reward function is a challenging problem in reinforcement learning (RL). Hierarchical RL (HRL) tackles this problem by learning a hierarchical policy, where multiple option policies are in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-12-01 Takayuki Osa , Masashi Sugiyama

Developing agents capable of exploring, planning and learning in complex open-ended environments is a grand challenge in artificial intelligence (AI). Hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) offers a promising solution to this challenge…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-06-18 Martin Klissarov , Akhil Bagaria , Ziyan Luo , George Konidaris , Doina Precup , Marlos C. Machado

Goal-oriented reinforcement learning has recently been a practical framework for robotic manipulation tasks, in which an agent is required to reach a certain goal defined by a function on the state space. However, the sparsity of such…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-19 Zhizhou Ren , Kefan Dong , Yuan Zhou , Qiang Liu , Jian Peng

In this paper, we study the cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) problems using Reward Machines (RMs) to specify the reward functions such that the prior knowledge of high-level events in a task can be leveraged to…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-03-13 Xuejing Zheng , Chao Yu

Exploration remains a critical issue in deep reinforcement learning for an agent to attain high returns in unknown environments. Although the prevailing exploration Random Network Distillation (RND) algorithm has been demonstrated to be…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-21 Kai Yang , Jian Tao , Jiafei Lyu , Xiu Li

In reinforcement learning, pre-trained low-level skills have the potential to greatly facilitate exploration. However, prior knowledge of the downstream task is required to strike the right balance between generality (fine-grained control)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-22 Jonas Gehring , Gabriel Synnaeve , Andreas Krause , Nicolas Usunier

Offline Reinforcement learning (RL) has shown potent in many safe-critical tasks in robotics where exploration is risky and expensive. However, it still struggles to acquire skills in temporally extended tasks. In this paper, we study the…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-05-25 Jinning Li , Chen Tang , Masayoshi Tomizuka , Wei Zhan

Meta-Reinforcement Learning (Meta-RL) enables fast adaptation to new testing tasks. Despite recent advancements, it is still challenging to learn performant policies across multiple complex and high-dimensional tasks. To address this, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-17 Minjae Cho , Chuangchuang Sun