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We propose a novel hierarchical reinforcement learning framework for quadruped locomotion over challenging terrain. Our approach incorporates a two-layer hierarchy in which a high-level policy (HLP) selects optimal goals for a low-level…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-06-26 Jeremiah Coholich , Muhammad Ali Murtaza , Seth Hutchinson , Zsolt Kira

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

Hierarchies of temporally decoupled policies present a promising approach for enabling structured exploration in complex long-term planning problems. To fully achieve this approach an end-to-end training paradigm is needed. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-19 Abdul Rahman Kreidieh , Glen Berseth , Brandon Trabucco , Samyak Parajuli , Sergey Levine , Alexandre M. Bayen

Shaping has proven to be a powerful but precarious means of improving reinforcement learning performance. Ng, Harada, and Russell (1999) proposed the potential-based shaping algorithm for adding shaping rewards in a way that guarantees the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2011-06-28 E. Wiewiora

In complex real-world tasks such as robotic manipulation and autonomous driving, collecting expert demonstrations is often more straightforward than specifying precise learning objectives and task descriptions. Learning from expert data can…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-05-05 Daulet Baimukashev , Gokhan Alcan , Kevin Sebastian Luck , Ville Kyrki

This paper explores multiple optimization methods to improve the performance of rating-based reinforcement learning (RbRL). RbRL, a method based on the idea of human ratings, has been developed to infer reward functions in reward-free…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-15 Evelyn Rose , Devin White , Mingkang Wu , Vernon Lawhern , Nicholas R. Waytowich , Yongcan Cao

Reinforcement learning problems are often described through rewards that indicate if an agent has completed some task. This specification can yield desirable behavior, however many problems are difficult to specify in this manner, as one…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2016-08-15 Ashley Edwards , Charles Isbell , Atsuo Takanishi

The aim of Reinforcement Learning (RL) in real-world applications is to create systems capable of making autonomous decisions by learning from their environment through trial and error. This paper emphasizes the importance of reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-31 Sinan Ibrahim , Mostafa Mostafa , Ali Jnadi , Hadi Salloum , Pavel Osinenko

Social goods, such as healthcare, smart city, and information networks, often produce ordered event data in continuous time. The generative processes of these event data can be very complex, requiring flexible models to capture their…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-29 Shuang Li , Shuai Xiao , Shixiang Zhu , Nan Du , Yao Xie , Le Song

In this paper, we present a novel Heavy-Tailed Stochastic Policy Gradient (HT-PSG) algorithm to deal with the challenges of sparse rewards in continuous control problems. Sparse reward is common in continuous control robotics tasks such as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-14 Souradip Chakraborty , Amrit Singh Bedi , Alec Koppel , Pratap Tokekar , Dinesh Manocha

In reinforcement learning, different reward functions can be equivalent in terms of the optimal policies they induce. A particularly well-known and important example is potential shaping, a class of functions that can be added to any reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-06 Erik Jenner , Herke van Hoof , Adam Gleave

Specifying reward functions for complex tasks like object manipulation or driving is challenging to do by hand. Reward learning seeks to address this by learning a reward model using human feedback on selected query policies. This shifts…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-27 Kush Bhatia , Wenshuo Guo , Jacob Steinhardt

In reinforcement learning, reward shaping is an efficient way to guide the learning process of an agent, as the reward can indicate the optimal policy of the task. The potential-based reward shaping framework was proposed to guarantee…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-02-08 Yifei Chen , Lambert Schomaker , Francisco Cruz

For autonomous vehicles, effective behavior planning is crucial to ensure safety of the ego car. In many urban scenarios, it is hard to create sufficiently general heuristic rules, especially for challenging scenarios that some new human…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-11-11 Zhiqian Qiao , Jeff Schneider , John M. Dolan

One major limitation to the applicability of Reinforcement Learning (RL) to many practical domains is the large number of samples required to learn an optimal policy. To address this problem and improve learning efficiency, we consider a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-07 Roberto Cipollone , Giuseppe De Giacomo , Marco Favorito , Luca Iocchi , Fabio Patrizi

Humans are spectacular reinforcement learners, constantly learning from and adjusting to experience and feedback. Unfortunately, this doesn't necessarily mean humans are fast learners. When tasks are challenging, learning can become…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-16 Mark A. Rucker , Layne T. Watson , Matthew S. Gerber , Laura E. Barnes

While reinforcement learning algorithms provide automated acquisition of optimal policies, practical application of such methods requires a number of design decisions, such as manually designing reward functions that not only define the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-29 Tim G. J. Rudner , Vitchyr H. Pong , Rowan McAllister , Yarin Gal , Sergey Levine

This paper presents an interpretable reward design framework for reinforcement learning based constrained optimal control problems with state and terminal constraints. The problem is formalized within a standard partially observable Markov…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-03-05 Jingjie Ni , Fangfei Li , Xin Jin , Xianlun Peng , Yang Tang

Recent studies show that Large Language Models (LLMs) achieve strong reasoning capabilities through supervised fine-tuning or reinforcement learning. However, a key approach, the Process Reward Model (PRM), suffers from reward hacking,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-10 Teng Wang , Zhangyi Jiang , Zhenqi He , Shenyang Tong , Wenhan Yang , Yanan Zheng , Zeyu Li , Zifan He , Hailei Gong , Zewen Ye , Shengjie Ma , Jianping Zhang

Preference-based reward learning is a popular technique for teaching robots and autonomous systems how a human user wants them to perform a task. Previous works have shown that actively synthesizing preference queries to maximize…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-03-12 Evan Ellis , Gaurav R. Ghosal , Stuart J. Russell , Anca Dragan , Erdem Bıyık