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Hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) improves the efficiency of long-horizon reinforcement-learning tasks with sparse rewards by decomposing the task into a hierarchy of subgoals. The main challenge of HRL is efficient discovery of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-08 Sadegh Khorasani , Saber Salehkaleybar , Negar Kiyavash , Matthias Grossglauser

Non-prehensile pushing actions have the potential to singulate a target object from its surrounding clutter in order to facilitate the robotic grasping of the target. To address this problem we utilize a heuristic rule that moves the target…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-09-27 Marios Kiatos , Iason Sarantopoulos , Sotiris Malassiotis , Zoe Doulgeri

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has been widely applied in autonomous exploration and mapping tasks, but often struggles with the challenges of sampling efficiency, poor adaptability to unknown map sizes, and slow simulation speed. To…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-02-28 Zhi Li , Jinghao Xin , Ning Li

Reinforcement learning (RL) in sparse-reward environments remains a significant challenge due to the lack of informative feedback. We propose a simple yet effective method that uses a small number of successful demonstrations to initialize…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-29 Seyed Mahdi Basiri Azad , Joschka Boedecker

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a popular approach for robotic path planning in uncertain environments. However, the control policies trained for an RL agent crucially depend on user-defined, state-based reward functions. Poorly designed…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-12-05 Anand Balakrishnan , Stefan Jakšić , Edgar A. Aguilar , Dejan Ničković , Jyotirmoy V. Deshmukh

Efficient exploration remains a challenging research problem in reinforcement learning, especially when an environment contains large state spaces, deceptive local optima, or sparse rewards. To tackle this problem, we present a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-10-30 Zhang-Wei Hong , Tzu-Yun Shann , Shih-Yang Su , Yi-Hsiang Chang , Chun-Yi Lee

Residual reinforcement learning (RL) has been proposed as a way to solve challenging robotic tasks by adapting control actions from a conventional feedback controller to maximize a reward signal. We extend the residual formulation to learn…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-16 Minttu Alakuijala , Gabriel Dulac-Arnold , Julien Mairal , Jean Ponce , Cordelia Schmid

Exploration efficiency poses a significant challenge in goal-conditioned reinforcement learning (GCRL) tasks, particularly those with long horizons and sparse rewards. A primary limitation to exploration efficiency is the agent's inability…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-22 Lisheng Wu , Ke Chen

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-30 Yuning Wu , Jieliang Luo , Hui Li

The goal of reinforcement learning (RL) is to let an agent learn an optimal control policy in an unknown environment so that future expected rewards are maximized. The model-free RL approach directly learns the policy based on data samples.…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2013-07-22 Syogo Mori , Voot Tangkaratt , Tingting Zhao , Jun Morimoto , Masashi Sugiyama

We introduce Self-supervised Online Reward Shaping (SORS), which aims to improve the sample efficiency of any RL algorithm in sparse-reward environments by automatically densifying rewards. The proposed framework alternates between…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-27 Farzan Memarian , Wonjoon Goo , Rudolf Lioutikov , Scott Niekum , Ufuk Topcu

Reinforcement Learning (RL) serves as a versatile framework for sequential decision-making, finding applications across diverse domains such as robotics, autonomous driving, recommendation systems, supply chain optimization, biology,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-26 Vaneet Aggarwal , Washim Uddin Mondal , Qinbo Bai

Robots must know how to be gentle when they need to interact with fragile objects, or when the robot itself is prone to wear and tear. We propose an approach that enables deep reinforcement learning to train policies that are gentle, both…

Exploration is essential in reinforcement learning as an agent relies on trial and error to learn an optimal policy. However, when rewards are sparse, naive exploration strategies, like noise injection, are often insufficient. Intrinsic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-30 Minjae Cho , Huy Trong Tran

Reinforcement learning agents learn from rewards, but humans can uniquely assign value to novel, abstract outcomes in a goal-dependent manner. However, this flexibility is cognitively costly, making learning less efficient. Here, we propose…

Neurons and Cognition · Quantitative Biology 2025-09-11 Gaia Molinaro , Anne G. E. Collins

This study presents a comparative analysis between single-objective and multi-objective reinforcement learning methods for training a robot to navigate effectively to an end goal while efficiently avoiding obstacles. Traditional…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-12-15 Vicki Young , Jumman Hossain , Nirmalya Roy

Existing robotic foundation policies are trained primarily via large-scale imitation learning. While such models demonstrate strong capabilities, they often struggle with long-horizon tasks due to distribution shift and error accumulation.…

Exploration with sparse rewards remains a challenging research problem in reinforcement learning (RL). Especially for sequential object manipulation tasks, the RL agent always receives negative rewards until completing all sub-tasks, which…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-11-04 Yongle Luo , Yuxin Wang , Kun Dong , Qiang Zhang , Erkang Cheng , Zhiyong Sun , Bo Song

Exploration is a fundamental aspect of reinforcement learning (RL), and its effectiveness is a deciding factor in the performance of RL algorithms, especially when facing sparse extrinsic rewards. Recent studies have shown the effectiveness…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-19 Shanchuan Wan , Yujin Tang , Yingtao Tian , Tomoyuki Kaneko

In this paper, we explore deep reinforcement learning algorithms for vision-based robotic grasping. Model-free deep reinforcement learning (RL) has been successfully applied to a range of challenging environments, but the proliferation of…

Robotics · Computer Science 2018-03-30 Deirdre Quillen , Eric Jang , Ofir Nachum , Chelsea Finn , Julian Ibarz , Sergey Levine