Related papers: Reward-Respecting Subtasks for Model-Based Reinfor…
Robotic grasping is a crucial area of research as it can result in the acceleration of the automation of several Industries utilizing robots ranging from manufacturing to healthcare. Reinforcement learning is the field of study where an…
Meta-learning algorithms use past experience to learn to quickly solve new tasks. In the context of reinforcement learning, meta-learning algorithms acquire reinforcement learning procedures to solve new problems more efficiently by…
A default assumption in the design of reinforcement-learning algorithms is that a decision-making agent always explores to learn optimal behavior. In sufficiently complex environments that approach the vastness and scale of the real world,…
We study deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms with delayed rewards. In many real-world tasks, instant rewards are often not readily accessible or even defined immediately after the agent performs actions. In this work, we first…
As machine learning models become more capable, they have exhibited increased potential in solving complex tasks. One of the most promising directions uses deep reinforcement learning to train autonomous agents in computer network defense…
Temporal abstraction allows reinforcement learning agents to represent knowledge and develop strategies over different temporal scales. The option-critic framework has been demonstrated to learn temporally extended actions, represented as…
Reinforcement learning algorithms struggle on tasks with complex hierarchical dependency structures. Humans and other intelligent agents do not waste time assessing the utility of every high-level action in existence, but instead only…
Recently, various auxiliary tasks have been proposed to accelerate representation learning and improve sample efficiency in deep reinforcement learning (RL). However, existing auxiliary tasks do not take the characteristics of RL problems…
In reinforcement learning (RL), rewards of states are typically considered additive, and following the Markov assumption, they are $\textit{independent}$ of states visited previously. In many important applications, such as coverage…
Reward design is a fundamental problem in reinforcement learning (RL). A misspecified or poorly designed reward can result in low sample efficiency and undesired behaviors. In this paper, we propose the idea of programmatic reward design,…
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…
In the long term, reinforcement learning (RL) is considered by many AI theorists to be the most promising path to artificial general intelligence. This places RL practitioners in a position to design systems that have never existed before…
In model-based reinforcement learning it is typical to decouple the problems of learning the dynamics model and learning the reward function. However, when the dynamics model is flawed, it may generate erroneous states that would never…
Goals for reinforcement learning problems are typically defined through hand-specified rewards. To design such problems, developers of learning algorithms must inherently be aware of what the task goals are, yet we often require agents to…
One of the key challenges in applying reinforcement learning to real-life problems is that the amount of train-and-error required to learn a good policy increases drastically as the task becomes complex. One potential solution to this…
The ability to exploit prior experience to solve novel problems rapidly is a hallmark of biological learning systems and of great practical importance for artificial ones. In the meta reinforcement learning literature much recent work has…
Reward models have been increasingly critical for improving the reasoning capability of LLMs. Existing research has shown that a well-trained reward model can substantially improve model performances at inference time via search. However,…
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…
One obstacle to applying reinforcement learning algorithms to real-world problems is the lack of suitable reward functions. Designing such reward functions is difficult in part because the user only has an implicit understanding of the task…
Efficient exploration is necessary to achieve good sample efficiency for reinforcement learning in general. From small, tabular settings such as gridworlds to large, continuous and sparse reward settings such as robotic object manipulation…