Related papers: Reward-Respecting Subtasks for Model-Based Reinfor…
The problem of reinforcement learning is considered where the environment or the model undergoes a change. An algorithm is proposed that an agent can apply in such a problem to achieve the optimal long-time discounted reward. The algorithm…
A central challenge in reinforcement learning is discovering effective policies for tasks where rewards are sparsely distributed. We postulate that in the absence of useful reward signals, an effective exploration strategy should seek out…
In offline reinforcement learning (RL) agents are trained using a logged dataset. It appears to be the most natural route to attack real-life applications because in domains such as healthcare and robotics interactions with the environment…
Improving sample efficiency is central to Reinforcement Learning (RL), especially in environments where the rewards are sparse. Some recent approaches have proposed to specify reward functions as manually designed or learned reward…
In this paper, we explore an approach to auxiliary task discovery in reinforcement learning based on ideas from representation learning. Auxiliary tasks tend to improve data efficiency by forcing the agent to learn auxiliary prediction and…
Options in reinforcement learning allow agents to hierarchically decompose a task into subtasks, having the potential to speed up learning and planning. However, autonomously learning effective sets of options is still a major challenge in…
Learning about many things can provide numerous benefits to a reinforcement learning system. For example, learning many auxiliary value functions, in addition to optimizing the environmental reward, appears to improve both exploration and…
Options, which impose an inductive bias toward temporal and hierarchical structure, offer a powerful framework for reinforcement learning (RL). While effective in sequential decision-making, they are often handcrafted rather than learned.…
Reinforcement learning agents learn by encouraging behaviours which maximize their total reward, usually provided by the environment. In many environments, however, the reward is provided after a series of actions rather than each single…
Complex planning and scheduling problems have long been solved using various optimization or heuristic approaches. In recent years, imitation learning that aims to learn from expert demonstrations has been proposed as a viable alternative…
Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms allow artificial agents to improve their selection of actions to increase rewarding experiences in their environments. Temporal Difference (TD) Learning -- a model-free RL method -- is a leading…
In reinforcement learning, temporal difference-based algorithms can be sample-inefficient: for instance, with sparse rewards, no learning occurs until a reward is observed. This can be remedied by learning richer objects, such as a model of…
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…
We consider the problem of reward learning for temporally extended tasks. For reward learning, inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) is a widely used paradigm. Given a Markov decision process (MDP) and a set of demonstrations for a task, IRL…
Reinforcement learning provides a general framework for learning robotic skills while minimizing engineering effort. However, most reinforcement learning algorithms assume that a well-designed reward function is provided, and learn a single…
Rewards play an essential role in reinforcement learning. In contrast to rule-based game environments with well-defined reward functions, complex real-world robotic applications, such as contact-rich manipulation, lack explicit and…
Although in recent years reinforcement learning has become very popular the number of successful applications to different kinds of operations research problems is rather scarce. Reinforcement learning is based on the well-studied dynamic…
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…
Reinforcement learning has shown promise in learning policies that can solve complex problems. However, manually specifying a good reward function can be difficult, especially for intricate tasks. Inverse reinforcement learning offers a…
Tasks where the set of possible actions depend discontinuously on the state pose a significant challenge for current reinforcement learning algorithms. For example, a locked door must be first unlocked, and then the handle turned before the…