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Learning a policy capable of moving an agent between any two states in the environment is important for many robotics problems involving navigation and manipulation. Due to the sparsity of rewards in such tasks, applying reinforcement…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-07-05 Artem Molchanov , Karol Hausman , Stan Birchfield , Gaurav Sukhatme

We study reinforcement learning (RL) problems in which agents observe the reward or transition realizations at their current state before deciding which action to take. Such observations are available in many applications, including…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-22 Nadav Merlis

Guiding the policy of multi-agent reinforcement learning to align with human common sense is a difficult problem, largely due to the complexity of modeling common sense as a reward, especially in complex and long-horizon multi-agent tasks.…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-02-20 Hao Ma , Shijie Wang , Zhiqiang Pu , Siyao Zhao , Xiaolin Ai

The use of Potential-Based Reward Shaping (PBRS) has shown great promise in the ongoing research effort to tackle sample inefficiency in Reinforcement Learning (RL). However, choosing the right potential function remains an open challenge.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-12 Giuseppe Canonaco , Leo Ardon , Alberto Pozanco , Daniel Borrajo

Identifying statistical regularities in solutions to some tasks in multi-task reinforcement learning can accelerate the learning of new tasks. Skill learning offers one way of identifying these regularities by decomposing pre-collected…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-12 Yiding Jiang , Evan Zheran Liu , Benjamin Eysenbach , Zico Kolter , Chelsea Finn

Learning in sparse reward settings remains a challenge in Reinforcement Learning, which is often addressed by using intrinsic rewards. One promising strategy is inspired by human curiosity, requiring the agent to learn to predict the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-10-02 Gino Brunner , Manuel Fritsche , Oliver Richter , Roger Wattenhofer

Reinforcement learning (RL) often struggles in real-world tasks with high-dimensional state spaces and long horizons, where sparse or fixed rewards severely slow down exploration and cause agents to get trapped in local optima. This paper…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-04-20 Hürkan Şahin , Van Huyen Dang , Erdi Sayar , Alper Yegenoglu , Erdal Kayacan

The reinforcement learning paradigm allows, in principle, for complex behaviours to be learned directly from simple reward signals. In practice, however, it is common to carefully hand-design the reward function to encourage a particular…

Reinforcement learning for the optimization of quantum circuits uses an agent whose goal is to maximize the value of a reward function that decides what is correct and what is wrong during the exploration of the search space. It is an open…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2023-11-22 Ioana Moflic , Alexandru Paler

Designing reward functions for efficiently guiding reinforcement learning (RL) agents toward specific behaviors is a complex task. This is challenging since it requires the identification of reward structures that are not sparse and that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-01 Dhawal Gupta , Yash Chandak , Scott M. Jordan , Philip S. Thomas , Bruno Castro da Silva

In order to reach higher degrees of flexibility, adaptability and autonomy in manufacturing systems, it is essential to develop new rescheduling methodologies which resort to cognitive capabilities, similar to those found in human beings.…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-05-28 Jorge A. Palombarini , Juan Cruz Barsce , Ernesto C. Martínez

In this paper, we propose a learning algorithm that speeds up the search in task and motion planning problems. Our algorithm proposes solutions to three different challenges that arise in learning to improve planning efficiency: what to…

Robotics · Computer Science 2018-07-27 Beomjoon Kim , Zi Wang , Leslie Pack Kaelbling , Tomas Lozano-Perez

Reward design is a critical part of the application of reinforcement learning, the performance of which strongly depends on how well the reward signal frames the goal of the designer and how well the signal assesses progress in reaching…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-01 Yixiang Wang , Yujing Hu , Feng Wu , Yingfeng Chen

In reinforcement learning, Return, which is the weighted accumulated future rewards, and Value, which is the expected return, serve as the objective that guides the learning of the policy. In classic RL, return is defined as the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-27 Yufei Wang , Qiwei Ye , Tie-Yan Liu

Model-based reinforcement learning is a promising learning strategy for practical robotic applications due to its improved data-efficiency versus model-free counterparts. However, current state-of-the-art model-based methods rely on shaped…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-10 Robert McCarthy , Qiang Wang , Stephen J. Redmond

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

Intrinsic motivation and reward shaping guide reinforcement learning (RL) agents by adding pseudo-rewards, which can lead to useful emergent behaviors. However, they can also encourage counterproductive exploits, e.g., fixation with noisy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-25 Aly Lidayan , Michael Dennis , Stuart Russell

Reward functions are central in specifying the task we want a reinforcement learning agent to perform. Given a task and desired optimal behavior, we study the problem of designing informative reward functions so that the designed rewards…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-13 Rati Devidze , Parameswaran Kamalaruban , Adish Singla

Recently, successful approaches have been made to exploit good-for-MDPs automata (B\"uchi automata with a restricted form of nondeterminism) for model free reinforcement learning, a class of automata that subsumes good for games automata…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2020-01-17 E. M. Hahn , M. Perez , S. Schewe , F. Somenzi , A. Trivedi , D. Wojtczak

Strategy learning in game environments with multi-agent is a challenging problem. Since each agent's reward is determined by the joint strategy, a greedy learning strategy that aims to maximize its own reward may fall into a local optimum.…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Xinyu Qiao , Yudong Hu , Congying Han , Weiyan Wu , Tiande Guo