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Many real-world robot learning problems, such as pick-and-place or arriving at a destination, can be seen as a problem of reaching a goal state as soon as possible. These problems, when formulated as episodic reinforcement learning tasks,…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-07-10 Gautham Vasan , Yan Wang , Fahim Shahriar , James Bergstra , Martin Jagersand , A. Rupam Mahmood

Reward machines are automaton-like structures that capture the memory required to accomplish a multi-stage task. When combined with reinforcement learning or optimal control methods, they can be used to synthesize robot policies to achieve…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-04-10 Mohamad Louai Shehab , Antoine Aspeel , Necmiye Ozay

In reinforcement learning (RL), state representations are key to dealing with large or continuous state spaces. While one of the promises of deep learning algorithms is to automatically construct features well-tuned for the task they try to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-21 Charline Le Lan , Stephen Tu , Mark Rowland , Anna Harutyunyan , Rishabh Agarwal , Marc G. Bellemare , Will Dabney

In the era of deep reinforcement learning, making progress is more complex, as the collected experience must be compressed into a deep model for future exploitation and sampling. Many papers have shown that training a deep learning policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-05 Glen Berseth

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become an increasingly active area of research in recent years. Although there are many algorithms that allow an agent to solve tasks efficiently, they often ignore the possibility that prior experience…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-01-07 Francisco M. Garcia , Chris Nota , Philip S. Thomas

Reinforcement learning (RL) plays a major role in solving complex sequential decision-making tasks. Hierarchical and goal-conditioned RL are promising methods for dealing with two major problems in RL, namely sample inefficiency and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-11 Amirhossein Mesbah , Reshad Hosseini , Seyed Pooya Shariatpanahi , Majid Nili Ahmadabadi

Diffusion models have achieved remarkable results in image generation, and have similarly been used to learn high-performing policies in sequential decision-making tasks. Decision-making diffusion models can be trained on lower-quality…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-12 Felipe Nuti , Tim Franzmeyer , João F. Henriques

The ability to plan actions on multiple levels of abstraction enables intelligent agents to solve complex tasks effectively. However, learning the models for both low and high-level planning from demonstrations has proven challenging,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-05-30 Kalle Kujanpää , Joni Pajarinen , Alexander Ilin

Effective exploration in reinforcement learning requires not only tracking where an agent has been, but also understanding how the agent perceives and represents the world. To learn powerful representations, an agent should actively explore…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Faisal Mohamed , Catherine Ji , Benjamin Eysenbach , Glen Berseth

We focus on an unloading problem, typical of the logistics sector, modeled as a sequential pick-and-place task. In this type of task, modern machine learning techniques have shown to work better than classic systems since they are more…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-05-30 Vittorio Giammarino , Andrew J Meyer , Kai Biegun

Real-world robotic tasks require complex reward functions. When we define the problem the robot needs to solve, we pretend that a designer specifies this complex reward exactly, and it is set in stone from then on. In practice, however,…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-11-19 Jerry Zhi-Yang He , Anca D. Dragan

Reinforcement-learning agents seek to maximize a reward signal through environmental interactions. As humans, our job in the learning process is to design reward functions to express desired behavior and enable the agent to learn such…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-08 Zhiyuan Zhou , Shreyas Sundara Raman , Henry Sowerby , Michael L. Littman

Goal-conditioned reinforcement learning endows an agent with a large variety of skills, but it often struggles to solve tasks that require more temporally extended reasoning. In this work, we propose to incorporate imagined subgoals into…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-02 Elliot Chane-Sane , Cordelia Schmid , Ivan Laptev

All reinforcement learning algorithms must handle the trade-off between exploration and exploitation. Many state-of-the-art deep reinforcement learning methods use noise in the action selection, such as Gaussian noise in policy gradient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-04-05 Trevor Barron , Oliver Obst , Heni Ben Amor

Reward machines (RMs) inform reinforcement learning agents about the reward structure of the environment. This is particularly advantageous for complex non-Markovian tasks because agents with access to RMs can learn more efficiently from…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-11-03 Kristina Levina , Nikolaos Pappas , Athanasios Karapantelakis , Aneta Vulgarakis Feljan , Jendrik Seipp

Learning a near optimal policy in a partially observable system remains an elusive challenge in contemporary reinforcement learning. In this work, we consider episodic reinforcement learning in a reward-mixing Markov decision process (MDP).…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-01 Jeongyeol Kwon , Yonathan Efroni , Constantine Caramanis , Shie Mannor

General-purpose trajectory planning algorithms for automated driving utilize complex reward functions to perform a combined optimization of strategic, behavioral, and kinematic features. The specification and tuning of a single reward…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-05-04 Sascha Rosbach , Xing Li , Simon Großjohann , Silviu Homoceanu , Stefan Roth

Offline reinforcement learning can enable policy learning from pre-collected, sub-optimal datasets without online interactions. This makes it ideal for real-world robots and safety-critical scenarios, where collecting online data or expert…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-08-07 Sreyas Venkataraman , Yufei Wang , Ziyu Wang , Navin Sriram Ravie , Zackory Erickson , David Held

Humans decompose novel complex tasks into simpler ones to exploit previously learned skills. Analogously, hierarchical reinforcement learning seeks to leverage lower-level policies for simple tasks to solve complex ones. However, because…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-15 Ju-Seung Byun , Andrew Perrault

Learning continuous control in high-dimensional sparse reward settings, such as robotic manipulation, is a challenging problem due to the number of samples often required to obtain accurate optimal value and policy estimates. While many…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-07-29 Sreehari Rammohan , Shangqun Yu , Bowen He , Eric Hsiung , Eric Rosen , Stefanie Tellex , George Konidaris