Related papers: Task Phasing: Automated Curriculum Learning from D…

Reinforcement learning (RL) in sparse-reward environments remains a significant challenge due to the lack of informative feedback. We propose a simple yet effective method that uses a small number of successful demonstrations to initialize…

Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms assume that users specify tasks by manually writing down a reward function. However, this process can be laborious and demands considerable technical expertise. Can we devise RL algorithms that instead…

With the fast improvement of machine learning, reinforcement learning (RL) has been used to automate human tasks in different areas. However, training such agents is difficult and restricted to expert users. Moreover, it is mostly limited…

Demonstration-guided reinforcement learning (RL) is a promising approach for learning complex behaviors by leveraging both reward feedback and a set of target task demonstrations. Prior approaches for demonstration-guided RL treat every new…

In this work, we propose several online methods to build a \emph{learning curriculum} from a given set of target-task-specific training tasks in order to speed up reinforcement learning (RL). These methods can decrease the total training…

Current reinforcement learning (RL) methods can successfully learn single tasks but often generalize poorly to modest perturbations in task domain or training procedure. In this work, we present a decoupled learning strategy for RL that…

Recent progress in deep reinforcement learning (RL) and computer vision enables artificial agents to solve complex tasks, including locomotion, manipulation and video games from high-dimensional pixel observations. However, domain specific…

Learning from rewards (i.e., reinforcement learning or RL) and learning to imitate a teacher (i.e., teacher-student learning) are two established approaches for solving sequential decision-making problems. To combine the benefits of these…

While reinforcement learning (RL) has been successful in natural language processing (NLP) domains such as dialogue generation and text-based games, it typically faces the problem of sparse rewards that leads to slow or no convergence.…

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…

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…

Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) infers a reward function from demonstrations, allowing for policy improvement and generalization. However, despite much recent interest in IRL, little work has been done to understand the minimum set of…

Meta-reinforcement learning (meta-RL) has proven to be a successful framework for leveraging experience from prior tasks to rapidly learn new related tasks, however, current meta-RL approaches struggle to learn in sparse reward…

In principle, meta-reinforcement learning algorithms leverage experience across many tasks to learn fast reinforcement learning (RL) strategies that transfer to similar tasks. However, current meta-RL approaches rely on manually-defined…

In curriculum reinforcement learning (CRL), an agent incrementally accumulates knowledge over a sequence of tasks (i.e., a curriculum), and the learning process is aimed at using the accumulated knowledge to finally solve a challenging…

Demonstration is an appealing way for humans to provide assistance to reinforcement-learning agents. Most approaches in this area view demonstrations primarily as sources of behavioral bias. But in sparse-reward tasks, humans seem to treat…

Curriculum reinforcement learning (CRL) improves the learning speed and stability of an agent by exposing it to a tailored series of tasks throughout learning. Despite empirical successes, an open question in CRL is how to automatically…

Standard regression techniques, while powerful, are often constrained by predefined, differentiable loss functions such as mean squared error. These functions may not fully capture the desired behavior of a system, especially when dealing…

Being able to solve a task in diverse ways makes agents more robust to task variations and less prone to local optima. In this context, constrained diversity optimization has become a useful reinforcement learning (RL) framework for…

Meta reinforcement learning (Meta-RL) is an approach wherein the experience gained from solving a variety of tasks is distilled into a meta-policy. The meta-policy, when adapted over only a small (or just a single) number of steps, is able…