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Exploration in environments with sparse rewards has been a persistent problem in reinforcement learning (RL). Many tasks are natural to specify with a sparse reward, and manually shaping a reward function can result in suboptimal…
To assist with everyday human activities, robots must solve complex long-horizon tasks and generalize to new settings. Recent deep reinforcement learning (RL) methods show promise in fully autonomous learning, but they struggle to reach…
Being able to reason in an environment with a large number of discrete actions is essential to bringing reinforcement learning to a larger class of problems. Recommender systems, industrial plants and language models are only some of the…
Ground robots which are able to navigate a variety of terrains are needed in many domains. One of the key aspects is the capability to adapt to the ground structure, which can be realized through movable body parts coming along with…
Hierarchical reinforcement learning (RL) can accelerate long-horizon decision-making by temporally abstracting a policy into multiple levels. Promising results in sparse reward environments have been seen with skills, i.e. sequences of…
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…
Abstraction plays an important role in the generalisation of knowledge and skills and is key to sample efficient learning. In this work, we study joint temporal and state abstraction in reinforcement learning, where temporally-extended…
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…
Solving long-horizon, temporally-extended tasks using Reinforcement Learning (RL) is challenging, compounded by the common practice of learning without prior knowledge (or tabula rasa learning). Humans can generate and execute plans with…
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…
A fundamental assumption of reinforcement learning in Markov decision processes (MDPs) is that the relevant decision process is, in fact, Markov. However, when MDPs have rich observations, agents typically learn by way of an abstract state…
We are concerned with the question of how an agent can acquire its own representations from sensory data. We restrict our focus to learning representations for long-term planning, a class of problems that state-of-the-art learning methods…
Two desiderata of reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms are the ability to learn from relatively little experience and the ability to learn policies that generalize to a range of problem specifications. In factored state spaces, one…
Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning (HRL) has made notable progress in complex control tasks by leveraging temporal abstraction. However, previous HRL algorithms often suffer from serious data inefficiency as environments get large. The…
Learning from Demonstration is increasingly used for transferring operator manipulation skills to robots. In practice, it is important to cater for limited data and imperfect human demonstrations, as well as underlying safety constraints.…
Modern listwise recommendation systems need to consider both long-term user perceptions and short-term interest shifts. Reinforcement learning can be applied on recommendation to study such a problem but is also subject to large search…
Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning (HRL) is well-suitedd for solving complex tasks by breaking them down into structured policies. However, HRL agents often struggle with efficient exploration and quick adaptation. To overcome these…
Multiagent reinforcement learning (MARL) is commonly considered to suffer from non-stationary environments and exponentially increasing policy space. It would be even more challenging when rewards are sparse and delayed over long…
Policy gradient methods hold great potential for solving complex continuous control tasks. Still, their training efficiency can be improved by exploiting structure within the optimization problem. Recent work indicates that supervised…
Reasoning at multiple levels of temporal abstraction is one of the key attributes of intelligence. In reinforcement learning, this is often modeled through temporally extended courses of actions called options. Options allow agents to make…