Related papers: Reward-Respecting Subtasks for Model-Based Reinfor…
Reinforcement learning (RL) methods usually treat reward functions as black boxes. As such, these methods must extensively interact with the environment in order to discover rewards and optimal policies. In most RL applications, however,…
Successfully navigating a complex environment to obtain a desired outcome is a difficult task, that up to recently was believed to be capable only by humans. This perception has been broken down over time, especially with the introduction…
Finding meaningful and accurate dense rewards is a fundamental task in the field of reinforcement learning (RL) that enables agents to explore environments more efficiently. In traditional RL settings, agents learn optimal policies through…
Inverse reinforcement learning is the problem of inferring a reward function from an optimal policy or demonstrations by an expert. In this work, it is assumed that the reward is expressed as a reward machine whose transitions depend on…
Reinforcement learning with sparse rewards is still an open challenge. Classic methods rely on getting feedback via extrinsic rewards to train the agent, and in situations where this occurs very rarely the agent learns slowly or cannot…
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…
When a person is not satisfied with how a robot performs a task, they can intervene to correct it. Reward learning methods enable the robot to adapt its reward function online based on such human input, but they rely on handcrafted…
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,…
Reward shaping is one of the most effective methods to tackle the crucial yet challenging problem of credit assignment in Reinforcement Learning (RL). However, designing shaping functions usually requires much expert knowledge and…
Exploration is widely regarded as one of the most challenging aspects of reinforcement learning (RL), with many naive approaches succumbing to exponential sample complexity. To isolate the challenges of exploration, we propose a new…
Deep Reinforcement Learning is a promising tool for robotic control, yet practical application is often hindered by the difficulty of designing effective reward functions. Real-world tasks typically require optimizing multiple objectives…
The ability of reinforcement learning algorithms to learn effective policies is determined by the rewards available during training. However, for practical problems, obtaining large quantities of reward labels is often infeasible due to…
Learned dynamics models combined with both planning and policy learning algorithms have shown promise in enabling artificial agents to learn to perform many diverse tasks with limited supervision. However, one of the fundamental challenges…
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…
Equipping artificial agents with useful exploration mechanisms remains a challenge to this day. Humans, on the other hand, seem to manage the trade-off between exploration and exploitation effortlessly. In the present article, we put…
Reward specification plays a central role in reinforcement learning (RL), guiding the agent's behavior. To express non-Markovian rewards, formalisms such as reward machines have been introduced to capture dependencies on histories. However,…
This paper reviews exploration techniques in deep reinforcement learning. Exploration techniques are of primary importance when solving sparse reward problems. In sparse reward problems, the reward is rare, which means that the agent will…
For most reinforcement learning approaches, the learning is performed by maximizing an accumulative reward that is expectedly and manually defined for specific tasks. However, in real world, rewards are emergent phenomena from the complex…
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…
Reward functions are notoriously difficult to specify, especially for tasks with complex goals. Reward learning approaches attempt to infer reward functions from human feedback and preferences. Prior works on reward learning have mainly…