Related papers: Hierarchical Potential-based Reward Shaping from T…
Reward machines (RMs) are a recent formalism for representing the reward function of a reinforcement learning task through a finite-state machine whose edges encode subgoals of the task using high-level events. The structure of RMs enables…
Learning to produce efficient movement behaviour for humanoid robots from scratch is a hard problem, as has been illustrated by the "Learning to run" competition at NIPS 2017. The goal of this competition was to train a two-legged model of…
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.…
Reward shaping has been applied widely to accelerate Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents' training. However, a principled way of designing effective reward shaping functions, especially for complex continuous control problems, remains…
Reinforcement learning is a promising approach for learning control policies for robot tasks. However, specifying complex tasks (e.g., with multiple objectives and safety constraints) can be challenging, since the user must design a reward…
Reinforcement learning practitioners often avoid hierarchical policies, especially in image-based observation spaces. Typically, the single-task performance improvement over flat-policy counterparts does not justify the additional…
Enabling a high-degree-of-freedom robot to learn specific skills is a challenging task due to the complexity of robotic dynamics. Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a promising solution; however, addressing such problems requires…
Reward shaping is one of the most effective methods to tackle the crucial yet challenging problem of credit assignment in Reinforcement Learning (RL). However, designing shaping functions usually requires much expert knowledge and…
Reinforcement learning (RL) has successfully automated the complex process of mining formulaic alpha factors, for creating interpretable and profitable investment strategies. However, existing methods are hampered by the sparse rewards…
Reward shaping is an effective technique for incorporating domain knowledge into reinforcement learning (RL). Existing approaches such as potential-based reward shaping normally make full use of a given shaping reward function. However,…
Many robotic tasks are composed of a lot of temporally correlated sub-tasks in a highly complex environment. It is important to discover situational intentions and proper actions by deliberating on temporal abstractions to solve problems…
Reward shaping is a technique in reinforcement learning that addresses the sparse-reward problem by providing more frequent and informative rewards. We introduce a self-adaptive and highly efficient reward shaping mechanism that…
Decision making for self-driving cars is usually tackled by manually encoding rules from drivers' behaviors or imitating drivers' manipulation using supervised learning techniques. Both of them rely on mass driving data to cover all…
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…
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…
Reward machines allow the definition of rewards for temporally extended tasks and behaviors. Specifying "informative" reward machines can be challenging. One way to address this is to generate reward machines from a high-level abstract…
Learning to solve sparse-reward reinforcement learning problems is difficult, due to the lack of guidance towards the goal. But in some problems, prior knowledge can be used to augment the learning process. Reward shaping is a way to…
Goal-conditioned reinforcement learning (RL) is an interesting extension of the traditional RL framework, where the dynamic environment and reward sparsity can cause conventional learning algorithms to fail. Reward shaping is a practical…
Reinforcement learning (RL) relies heavily on exploration to learn from its environment and maximize observed rewards. Therefore, it is essential to design a reward function that guarantees optimal learning from the received experience.…
In continuing tasks, average-reward reinforcement learning may be a more appropriate problem formulation than the more common discounted reward formulation. As usual, learning an optimal policy in this setting typically requires a large…