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Autonomous navigation in crowded environments is an open problem with many applications, essential for the coexistence of robots and humans in the smart cities of the future. In recent years, deep reinforcement learning approaches have…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-03-25 Diego Martinez-Baselga , Luis Riazuelo , Luis Montano

Exploration algorithms for reinforcement learning typically replace or augment the reward function with an additional ``intrinsic'' reward that trains the agent to seek previously unseen states of the environment. Here, we consider an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Kevin McKee , Eric Alt , Andrew Grebenisan , Mick van Gelderen , Gary Miguel

Reinforcement learning (RL) has recently proven great success in various domains. Yet, the design of the reward function requires detailed domain expertise and tedious fine-tuning to ensure that agents are able to learn the desired…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-03-06 Murad Dawood , Nils Dengler , Jorge de Heuvel , Maren Bennewitz

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

Teaching agents to follow complex written instructions has been an important yet elusive goal. One technique for enhancing learning efficiency is language reward shaping (LRS). Within a reinforcement learning (RL) framework, LRS involves…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-08-21 Sukai Huang , Nir Lipovetzky , Trevor Cohn

To promote cooperation in Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning, the reward signals of all agents can be aggregated together, forming global rewards that are commonly known as the fully cooperative setting. However, global rewards are usually…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-30 Bang Giang Le , Viet Cuong Ta

Controlled text generation tasks such as unsupervised text style transfer have increasingly adopted the use of Reinforcement Learning (RL). A major challenge in applying RL to such tasks is the sparse reward, which is available only after…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-04-19 Bhargav Upadhyay , Akhilesh Sudhakar , Arjun Maheswaran

Improving sample efficiency is a key challenge in reinforcement learning, especially in environments with large state spaces and sparse rewards. In literature, this is resolved either through the use of auxiliary tasks (subgoals) or through…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-28 Durgesh Kalwar , Omkar Shelke , Somjit Nath , Hardik Meisheri , Harshad Khadilkar

Reinforcement learning (RL) agents often face challenges in balancing exploration and exploitation, particularly in environments where sparse or dense rewards bias learning. Biological systems, such as human toddlers, naturally navigate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-30 Junseok Park , Hyeonseo Yang , Min Whoo Lee , Won-Seok Choi , Minsu Lee , Byoung-Tak Zhang

We consider the problem of reinforcement learning under safety requirements, in which an agent is trained to complete a given task, typically formalized as the maximization of a reward signal over time, while concurrently avoiding…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-09-25 Tu-Hoa Pham , Giovanni De Magistris , Don Joven Agravante , Subhajit Chaudhury , Asim Munawar , Ryuki Tachibana

Efficient and effective learning is one of the ultimate goals of the deep reinforcement learning (DRL), although the compromise has been made in most of the time, especially for the application of robot manipulations. Learning is always…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-06 Yongle Luo , Kun Dong , Lili Zhao , Zhiyong Sun , Chao Zhou , Bo Song

Reinforcement learning can solve decision-making problems and train an agent to behave in an environment according to a predesigned reward function. However, such an approach becomes very problematic if the reward is too sparse and so the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-06-12 Matej Pecháč , Michal Chovanec , Igor Farkaš

Multi-goal reinforcement learning (RL) aims to qualify the agent to accomplish multi-goal tasks, which is of great importance in learning scalable robotic manipulation skills. However, reward engineering always requires strenuous efforts in…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-09-27 Deyu Yang , Hanbo Zhang , Xuguang Lan , Jishiyu Ding

Sparse-reward domains are challenging for reinforcement learning algorithms since significant exploration is needed before encountering reward for the first time. Hierarchical reinforcement learning can facilitate exploration by reducing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-13 Lorenzo Steccanella , Simone Totaro , Damien Allonsius , Anders Jonsson

Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) is a promising approach for teaching robots new behaviour. However, one of its main limitations is the need for carefully hand-coded reward signals by an expert. We argue that it is crucial to automate the…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-08-09 Abdalkarim Mohtasib , Gerhard Neumann , Heriberto Cuayahuitl

Reward shaping (RS) is a powerful method in reinforcement learning (RL) for overcoming the problem of sparse or uninformative rewards. However, RS typically relies on manually engineered shaping-reward functions whose construction is…

Reinforcement learning, which acquires a policy maximizing long-term rewards, has been actively studied. Unfortunately, this learning type is too slow and difficult to use in practical situations because the state-action space becomes huge…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-28 Takato Okudo , Seiji Yamada

Robots must know how to be gentle when they need to interact with fragile objects, or when the robot itself is prone to wear and tear. We propose an approach that enables deep reinforcement learning to train policies that are gentle, both…

Text-based games are a popular testbed for language-based reinforcement learning (RL). In previous work, deep Q-learning is commonly used as the learning agent. Q-learning algorithms are challenging to apply to complex real-world domains…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-28 Weichen Li , Rati Devidze , Sophie Fellenz

Information gathering in a partially observable environment can be formulated as a reinforcement learning (RL), problem where the reward depends on the agent's uncertainty. For example, the reward can be the negative entropy of the agent's…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-05-12 Yash Satsangi , Sungsu Lim , Shimon Whiteson , Frans Oliehoek , Martha White