Related papers: Dealing with Sparse Rewards in Continuous Control …
Goal-oriented reinforcement learning has recently been a practical framework for robotic manipulation tasks, in which an agent is required to reach a certain goal defined by a function on the state space. However, the sparsity of such…
Mastering robotic manipulation skills through reinforcement learning (RL) typically requires the design of shaped reward functions. Recent developments in this area have demonstrated that using sparse rewards, i.e. rewarding the agent only…
Sparse continuous policies are distributions that can choose some actions at random yet keep strictly zero probability for the other actions, which are radically different from the Gaussian. They have important real-world implications, e.g.…
Large-scale non-convex sparsity-constrained problems have recently gained extensive attention. Most existing deterministic optimization methods (e.g., GraSP) are not suitable for large-scale and high-dimensional problems, and thus…
Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning (HRL) exploits temporally extended actions, or options, to make decisions from a higher-dimensional perspective to alleviate the sparse reward problem, one of the most challenging problems in…
In this paper, we investigate the obstacle avoidance and navigation problem in the robotic control area. For solving such a problem, we propose revised Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (DDPG) and Proximal Policy Optimization algorithms…
The success of popular algorithms for deep reinforcement learning, such as policy-gradients and Q-learning, relies heavily on the availability of an informative reward signal at each timestep of the sequential decision-making process. When…
Designing reward functions is a challenging problem in AI and robotics. Humans usually have a difficult time directly specifying all the desirable behaviors that a robot needs to optimize. One common approach is to learn reward functions…
The Gaussian process (GP) is a powerful tool for nonparametric modeling, but its sensitivity to outliers limits its applicability to data distributions with heavy-tails. Studentt processes offer a robust alternative for heavy tail modeling,…
The naive application of Reinforcement Learning algorithms to continuous control problems -- such as locomotion and manipulation -- often results in policies which rely on high-amplitude, high-frequency control signals, known colloquially…
Improving sample efficiency is central to Reinforcement Learning (RL), especially in environments where the rewards are sparse. Some recent approaches have proposed to specify reward functions as manually designed or learned reward…
Policy gradient (PG) methods are a widely used reinforcement learning methodology in many applications such as video games, autonomous driving, and robotics. In spite of its empirical success, a rigorous understanding of the global…
Reward shaping is a technique in reinforcement learning that addresses the sparse-reward problem by providing more frequent and informative rewards. We introduce a self-adaptive and highly efficient reward shaping mechanism that…
Language-guided robotic grasping is a rapidly advancing field where robots are instructed using human language to grasp specific objects. However, existing methods often depend on dense camera views and struggle to quickly update scenes,…
While large language models excel in diverse domains, their performance on complex longhorizon agentic decision-making tasks remains limited. Most existing methods concentrate on designing effective reward models (RMs) to advance…
Sparse optimization receives increasing attention in many applications such as compressed sensing, variable selection in regression problems, and recently neural network compression in machine learning. For example, the problem of…
Sparse rewards and long time horizons remain challenging for reinforcement learning algorithms. Exploration bonuses can help in sparse reward settings by encouraging agents to explore the state space, while hierarchical approaches can…
Motivated by penalized likelihood maximization in complex models, we study optimization problems where neither the function to optimize nor its gradient have an explicit expression, but its gradient can be approximated by a Monte Carlo…
Stochastic optimization algorithms, particularly stochastic policy gradient (SPG), report significant success in reinforcement learning (RL). Nevertheless, up to now, that how to speedily acquire an optimal solution for RL is still a…
Rewards play a crucial role in reinforcement learning. To arrive at the desired policy, the design of a suitable reward function often requires significant domain expertise as well as trial-and-error. Here, we aim to minimize the effort…