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We consider the problem of learning from sparse and underspecified rewards, where an agent receives a complex input, such as a natural language instruction, and needs to generate a complex response, such as an action sequence, while only…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-23 Rishabh Agarwal , Chen Liang , Dale Schuurmans , Mohammad Norouzi

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has progressed from simple control tasks to complex real-world challenges with large state spaces. While RL excels in these tasks, training time remains a limitation. Reward shaping is a popular solution, but…

An emerging field of sequential decision problems is safe Reinforcement Learning (RL), where the objective is to maximize the reward while obeying safety constraints. Being able to handle constraints is essential for deploying RL agents in…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-03-08 Nick Bührer , Zhejun Zhang , Alexander Liniger , Fisher Yu , Luc Van Gool

Safe Multi-agent reinforcement learning (safe MARL) has increasingly gained attention in recent years, emphasizing the need for agents to not only optimize the global return but also adhere to safety requirements through behavioral…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-13 Xuefeng Wang , Henglin Pu , Hyung Jun Kim , Husheng Li

Sparse rewards pose a significant challenge to achieving high sample efficiency in goal-conditioned reinforcement learning (RL). Specifically, in sequential manipulation tasks, the agent receives failure rewards until it successfully…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-06-24 Yuming Huang , Bin Ren , Ziming Xu , Lianghong Wu

Model-free reinforcement learning (RL) is a powerful approach for learning control policies directly from high-dimensional state and observation. However, it tends to be data-inefficient, which is especially costly in robotic learning…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-10-14 Xubo Lyu , Mo Chen

Reward-free reinforcement learning (RL) considers the setting where the agent does not have access to a reward function during exploration, but must propose a near-optimal policy for an arbitrary reward function revealed only after…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-22 Andrew Wagenmaker , Yifang Chen , Max Simchowitz , Simon S. Du , Kevin Jamieson

Model-free RL-based recommender systems have recently received increasing research attention due to their capability to handle partial feedback and long-term rewards. However, most existing research has ignored a critical feature in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-28 Tianchi Cai , Shenliao Bao , Jiyan Jiang , Shiji Zhou , Wenpeng Zhang , Lihong Gu , Jinjie Gu , Guannan Zhang

Robotic systems must be able to quickly and robustly make decisions when operating in uncertain and dynamic environments. While Reinforcement Learning (RL) can be used to compute optimal policies with little prior knowledge about the…

Robotics · Computer Science 2016-09-13 Yunpeng Pan , Xinyan Yan , Evangelos Theodorou , Byron Boots

Learning effective policies for sparse objectives is a key challenge in Deep Reinforcement Learning (RL). A common approach is to design task-related dense rewards to improve task learnability. While such rewards are easily interpreted,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-12 Hassam Sheikh , Shauharda Khadka , Santiago Miret , Somdeb Majumdar

Sampling-based model predictive control (MPC) has found significant success in optimal control problems with non-smooth system dynamics and cost function. Many machine learning-based works proposed to improve MPC by a) learning or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-08 Sungwook Yang , Chaoying Pei , Ran Dai , Chuangchuang Sun

Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents often struggle with inefficient exploration, particularly in environments with sparse rewards. Traditional exploration strategies can lead to slow learning and suboptimal performance because agents fail to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Gaurav Chaudhary , Laxmidhar Behera , Washim Uddin Mondal

In reward-free reinforcement learning (RL), an agent explores the environment first without any reward information, in order to achieve certain learning goals afterwards for any given reward. In this paper we focus on reward-free RL under…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-21 Yuan Cheng , Ruiquan Huang , Jing Yang , Yingbin Liang

We study reinforcement learning (RL) for decision processes with non-Markovian reward, in which high-level knowledge of the task in the form of reward machines is available to the learner. We consider probabilistic reward machines with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-30 Hippolyte Bourel , Anders Jonsson , Odalric-Ambrym Maillard , Chenxiao Ma , Mohammad Sadegh Talebi

In this paper, we leverage ideas from model-based control to address the sample efficiency problem of reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms. Accelerating learning is an active field of RL highly relevant in the context of time-varying…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-05-23 Ibrahim Ahmed , Marcos Quinones-Grueiro , Gautam Biswas

This paper presents an interpretable reward design framework for reinforcement learning based constrained optimal control problems with state and terminal constraints. The problem is formalized within a standard partially observable Markov…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-03-05 Jingjie Ni , Fangfei Li , Xin Jin , Xianlun Peng , Yang Tang

Sampling-based Model Predictive Control (MPC) is a flexible control framework that can reason about non-smooth dynamics and cost functions. Recently, significant work has focused on the use of machine learning to improve the performance of…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-12-07 Jacob Sacks , Byron Boots

It has been a recent trend to leverage the power of supervised learning (SL) towards more effective reinforcement learning (RL) methods. We propose a novel phasic approach by alternating online RL and offline SL for tackling sparse-reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-27 Yunfei Li , Tian Gao , Jiaqi Yang , Huazhe Xu , Yi Wu

Reward shaping is one of the most effective methods to tackle the crucial yet challenging problem of credit assignment in Reinforcement Learning (RL). However, designing shaping functions usually requires much expert knowledge and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-01-29 Haosheng Zou , Tongzheng Ren , Dong Yan , Hang Su , Jun Zhu

We propose novel iterative learning control algorithms to track a reference trajectory in resource-constrained control systems. In many applications, there are constraints on the number of control actions, delivered to the actuator from the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2017-09-29 Burak Demirel , Euhanna Ghadimi , Daniel E. Quevedo