Related papers: A General, Evolution-Inspired Reward Function for …

Reinforcement learning (RL) has shown to be a valuable tool in training neural networks for autonomous motion planning. The application of RL to a specific problem is dependent on a reward signal to quantify how good or bad a certain action…

We introduce ReWiND, a framework for learning robot manipulation tasks solely from language instructions without per-task demonstrations. Standard reinforcement learning (RL) and imitation learning methods require expert supervision through…

Existing approaches to reward inference from behavior typically assume that humans provide demonstrations according to specific models of behavior. However, humans often indicate their goals through a wide range of behaviors, from actions…

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,…

In order for autonomous mobile robots to navigate in human spaces, they must abide by our social norms. Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as an effective method to train sequential decision-making policies that are able to respect…

Socially aware navigation is a fast-evolving research area in robotics that enables robots to move within human environments while adhering to the implicit human social norms. The advent of Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has accelerated…

Training chatbots using the reinforcement learning paradigm is challenging due to high-dimensional states, infinite action spaces and the difficulty in specifying the reward function. We address such problems using clustered actions instead…

Automating robotic surgery via learning from demonstration (LfD) techniques is extremely challenging. This is because surgical tasks often involve sequential decision-making processes with complex interactions of physical objects and have…

When robots learn reward functions using high capacity models that take raw state directly as input, they need to both learn a representation for what matters in the task -- the task ``features" -- as well as how to combine these features…

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…

Recent advances in reinforcement learning have inspired increasing interest in learning user modeling adaptively through dynamic interactions, e.g., in reinforcement learning based recommender systems. Reward function is crucial for most of…

We propose leveraging prosocial observations to cultivate new social norms to encourage prosocial behaviors toward delivery robots. With an online experiment, we quantitatively assess updates in norm beliefs regarding human-robot prosocial…

The design of reward functions in reinforcement learning is a human skill that comes with experience. Unfortunately, there is not any methodology in the literature that could guide a human to design the reward function or to allow a human…

Future robots should follow human social norms in order to be useful and accepted in human society. In this paper, we leverage already existing social knowledge in human societies by capturing it in our framework through the notion of…

Well-designed dense reward functions in robot manipulation not only indicate whether a task is completed but also encode progress along the way. Generally, designing dense rewards is challenging and usually requires access to privileged…

The demand for social robots in fields like healthcare, education, and entertainment increases due to their emotional adaptation features. These robots leverage multimodal communication, incorporating speech, facial expressions, and…

Reinforcement learning provides an automated framework for learning behaviors from high-level reward specifications, but in practice the choice of reward function can be crucial for good results -- while in principle the reward only needs…

With momentum increasing in the use of social robots as long-term assistive and collaborative partners, humans developing social bonds with these artificial agents appears to be inevitable. In human-human dyads, social bonding plays a…

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is known to be often unsuccessful in environments with sparse extrinsic rewards. A possible countermeasure is to endow RL agents with an intrinsic reward function, or 'intrinsic motivation', which rewards the…

Self-paced reinforcement learning (RL) aims to improve the data efficiency of learning by automatically creating sequences, namely curricula, of probability distributions over contexts. However, existing techniques for self-paced RL fail in…