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Designing reward functions that generalize beyond controlled laboratory settings remains a fundamental challenge in reinforcement learning for robotics. In open-world manipulation problems, a single task can appear in numerous variants…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Tengye Xu , Yangting Sun , Ziju Shen , Guanqi Chen , Zhen Fu , Chen yizhou , Hua Chen , Jia Pan

Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents have demonstrated their potential across various robotic tasks. However, they still heavily rely on human-engineered reward functions, requiring extensive trial-and-error and access to target behavior…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-03-03 Changyeon Kim , Minho Heo , Doohyun Lee , Jinwoo Shin , Honglak Lee , Joseph J. Lim , Kimin Lee

In reinforcement learning (RL), sparse rewards are a natural way to specify the task to be learned. However, most RL algorithms struggle to learn in this setting since the learning signal is mostly zeros. In contrast, humans are good at…

Inferring reward functions from demonstrations and pairwise preferences are auspicious approaches for aligning Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents with human intentions. However, state-of-the art methods typically focus on learning a single…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-04 Markus Peschl , Arkady Zgonnikov , Frans A. Oliehoek , Luciano C. Siebert

Reinforcement learning (RL) has been widely used in text generation to alleviate the exposure bias issue or to utilize non-parallel datasets. The reward function plays an important role in making RL training successful. However, previous…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-19 Yongchang Hao , Yuxin Liu , Lili Mou

In this paper we address the challenge of exploration in deep reinforcement learning for robotic manipulation tasks. In sparse goal settings, an agent does not receive any positive feedback until randomly achieving the goal, which becomes…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-02-23 Nikola Vulin , Sammy Christen , Stefan Stevsic , Otmar Hilliges

Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms assume that users specify tasks by manually writing down a reward function. However, this process can be laborious and demands considerable technical expertise. Can we devise RL algorithms that instead…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-03 Benjamin Eysenbach , Sergey Levine , Ruslan Salakhutdinov

The market for domestic robots made to perform household chores is growing as these robots relieve people of everyday responsibilities. Domestic robots are generally welcomed for their role in easing human labor, in contrast to industrial…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-05-30 Arpita Soni , Sujatha Alla , Suresh Dodda , Hemanth Volikatla

Handing objects to humans is an essential capability for collaborative robots. Previous research works on human-robot handovers focus on facilitating the performance of the human partner and possibly minimising the physical effort needed to…

Reinforcement learning (RL) is concerned with how intelligence agents take actions in a given environment to maximize the cumulative reward they receive. In healthcare, applying RL algorithms could assist patients in improving their health…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-04-21 Chengchun Shi

When we design and deploy an Reinforcement Learning (RL) agent, reward functions motivates agents to achieve an objective. An incorrect or incomplete specification of the objective can result in behavior that does not align with human…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-06-03 Zhaoyue Wang

Learning from human feedback has shown to be a useful approach in acquiring robot reward functions. However, expert feedback is often assumed to be drawn from an underlying unimodal reward function. This assumption does not always hold…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-20 Vivek Myers , Erdem Bıyık , Nima Anari , Dorsa Sadigh

Social intelligence has become a critical capability for large language models (LLMs), enabling them to engage effectively in real-world social tasks such as collaboration and negotiation. Reinforcement learning (RL) is a natural fit for…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-09 Haofei Yu , Zhengyang Qi , Yining Zhao , Kolby Nottingham , Keyang Xuan , Bodhisattwa Prasad Majumder , Hao Zhu , Paul Pu Liang , Jiaxuan You

Deep reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a promising approach for autonomously acquiring complex behaviors from low level sensor observations. Although a large portion of deep RL research has focused on applications in video games…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-02-08 Julian Ibarz , Jie Tan , Chelsea Finn , Mrinal Kalakrishnan , Peter Pastor , Sergey Levine

The success of many RL techniques heavily relies on human-engineered dense rewards, which typically demand substantial domain expertise and extensive trial and error. In our work, we propose DrS (Dense reward learning from Stages), a novel…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-26 Tongzhou Mu , Minghua Liu , Hao Su

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has progressed from simple control tasks to complex real-world challenges with large state spaces. While RL excels in these tasks, training time remains a limitation. Reward shaping is a popular solution, but…

Reward engineering has long been a challenge in Reinforcement Learning (RL) research, as it often requires extensive human effort and iterative processes of trial-and-error to design effective reward functions. In this paper, we propose…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-06-18 Yufei Wang , Zhanyi Sun , Jesse Zhang , Zhou Xian , Erdem Biyik , David Held , Zackory Erickson

While reinforcement learning (RL) has become a more popular approach for robotics, designing sufficiently informative reward functions for complex tasks has proven to be extremely difficult due their inability to capture human intent and…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-12-08 Joey Hejna , Dorsa Sadigh

(This work has been submitted to the IEEE for possible publication. Copyright may be transferred without notice, after which this version may no longer be accessible.) To improve the efficiency of deep reinforcement learning (DRL)-based…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-05-25 Gang Peng , Jin Yang , Xinde Lia , Mohammad Omar Khyam

Deep reinforcement learning (RL) can acquire complex behaviors from low-level inputs, such as images. However, real-world applications of such methods require generalizing to the vast variability of the real world. Deep networks are known…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-03-13 Chelsea Finn , Tianhe Yu , Justin Fu , Pieter Abbeel , Sergey Levine