Related papers: Near-Optimal Algorithms for Autonomous Exploration…
This paper addresses the problem of optimal control of robotic sensing systems aimed at autonomous information gathering in scenarios such as environmental monitoring, search and rescue, and surveillance and reconnaissance. The information…
Autonomous exploration has many important applications. However, classic information gain-based or frontier-based exploration only relies on the robot current state to determine the immediate exploration goal, which lacks the capability of…
In this paper, we consider a class of continuous-time, continuous-space stochastic optimal control problems. Building upon recent advances in Markov chain approximation methods and sampling-based algorithms for deterministic path planning,…
In order to compute near-optimal policies with policy-gradient algorithms, it is common in practice to include intrinsic exploration terms in the learning objective. Although the effectiveness of these terms is usually justified by an…
Single Source Shortest Paths ($\textrm{SSSP}$) is among the most well-studied problems in computer science. In the incremental (resp. decremental) setting, the goal is to maintain distances from a fixed source in a graph undergoing edge…
Many policy search algorithms have been proposed for robot learning and proved to be practical in real robot applications. However, there are still hyperparameters in the algorithms, such as the exploration rate, which requires manual…
Exploration in reinforcement learning (RL) remains an open challenge. RL algorithms rely on observing rewards to train the agent, and if informative rewards are sparse the agent learns slowly or may not learn at all. To improve exploration…
Autonomous exploration in mobile robotics often involves a trade-off between two objectives: maximizing environmental coverage and minimizing the total path length. In the widely used information gain paradigm, exploration is guided by the…
Balancing exploration and conservatism in the constrained setting is an important problem if we are to use reinforcement learning for meaningful tasks in the real world. In this paper, we propose a principled algorithm for safe exploration…
We study the combinatorial pure exploration problem Best-Set in stochastic multi-armed bandits. In a Best-Set instance, we are given $n$ arms with unknown reward distributions, as well as a family $\mathcal{F}$ of feasible subsets over the…
Within the framework of probably approximately correct Markov decision processes (PAC-MDP), much theoretical work has focused on methods to attain near optimality after a relatively long period of learning and exploration. However,…
We propose a novel reformulation of the stochastic optimal control problem as an approximate inference problem, demonstrating, that such a interpretation leads to new practical methods for the original problem. In particular we characterise…
We address the problem of minimal actuator placement in linear systems so that the volume of the set of states reachable with one unit or less of input energy is lower bounded by a desired value. First, following the recent work of…
A natural optimization model that formulates many online resource allocation and revenue management problems is the online linear program (LP) in which the constraint matrix is revealed column by column along with the corresponding…
We consider the bi-criteria shortest-path problem where we want to compute shortest paths on a graph that simultaneously balance two cost functions. While this problem has numerous applications, there is usually no path minimizing both cost…
This work studies object goal navigation task, which involves navigating to the closest object related to the given semantic category in unseen environments. Recent works have shown significant achievements both in the end-to-end…
To achieve sample efficiency in reinforcement learning (RL), it necessitates efficiently exploring the underlying environment. Under the offline setting, addressing the exploration challenge lies in collecting an offline dataset with…
In the contextual linear bandit setting, algorithms built on the optimism principle fail to exploit the structure of the problem and have been shown to be asymptotically suboptimal. In this paper, we follow recent approaches of deriving…
Autonomous exploration of cluttered environments requires efficient exploration strategies that guarantee safety against potential collisions with unknown random obstacles. This paper presents a novel approach combining a graph neural…
Autonomous exploration using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is essential for various tasks such as building inspections, rescue operations, deliveries, and warehousing. However, there are two main limitations to previous approaches: they…