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Reinforcement learning (RL) is effective in many robotic applications, but it requires extensive exploration of the state-action space, during which behaviors can be unsafe. This significantly limits its applicability to large robots with…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-01-05 Mehdi Heydari Shahna , Pauli Mustalahti , Jouni Mattila

During initial iterations of training in most Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms, agents perform a significant number of random exploratory steps. In the real world, this can limit the practicality of these algorithms as it can lead to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-17 Ashish Kumar Jayant , Shalabh Bhatnagar

Hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) is hypothesized to be able to leverage the inherent hierarchy in learning tasks where traditional reinforcement learning (RL) often fails. In this research, HRL is evaluated and contrasted with…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-08-20 Brendon Johnson , Alfredo Weitzenfeld

In recent years, Reinforcement Learning (RL) has been applied to real-world problems with increasing success. Such applications often require to put constraints on the agent's behavior. Existing algorithms for constrained RL (CRL) rely on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-07 Ted Moskovitz , Brendan O'Donoghue , Vivek Veeriah , Sebastian Flennerhag , Satinder Singh , Tom Zahavy

Solving long-horizon goal-conditioned tasks remains a significant challenge in reinforcement learning (RL). Hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) addresses this by decomposing tasks into more manageable sub-tasks, but the automatic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-09 Yang Yu

Robotic systems are nowadays capable of solving complex navigation tasks. However, their capabilities are limited to the knowledge of the designer and consequently lack generalizability to initially unconsidered situations. This makes deep…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-05-24 Christopher Gebauer , Nils Dengler , Maren Bennewitz

Sequential Resource Allocation with situational constraints presents a significant challenge in real-world applications, where resource demands and priorities are context-dependent. This paper introduces a novel framework, SCRL, to address…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-06-18 Libo Zhang , Yang Chen , Toru Takisaka , Kaiqi Zhao , Weidong Li , Jiamou Liu

Safety in reinforcement learning (RL) is a key property in both training and execution in many domains such as autonomous driving or finance. In this paper, we formalize it with a constrained RL formulation in the distributional RL setting.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-01 Jianyi Zhang , Paul Weng

Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents have great successes in solving tasks with large observation and action spaces from limited feedback. Still, training the agents is data-intensive and there are no guarantees that the learned behavior is…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-10-20 Helge Spieker

Safety is critical when applying reinforcement learning (RL) to real-world problems. As a result, safe RL has emerged as a fundamental and powerful paradigm for optimizing an agent's policy while incorporating notions of safety. A prevalent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-09 Akifumi Wachi , Xun Shen , Yanan Sui

Solving robotic navigation tasks via reinforcement learning (RL) is challenging due to their sparse reward and long decision horizon nature. However, in many navigation tasks, high-level (HL) task representations, like a rough floor plan,…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-11-08 Jan Wöhlke , Felix Schmitt , Herke van Hoof

Goal-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning (GCRL) can enable agents to spontaneously set diverse goals to learn a set of skills. Despite the excellent works proposed in various fields, reaching distant goals in temporally extended tasks…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-07-21 Zhifeng Qian , Mingyu You , Hongjun Zhou , Xuanhui Xu , Bin He

Despite recent advances in improving the sample-efficiency of reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms, designing an RL algorithm that can be practically deployed in real-world environments remains a challenge. In this paper, we present…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-07-11 Younggyo Seo , Jafar Uruç , Stephen James

We propose Convex Constraint Learning for Reinforcement Learning (CoCoRL), a novel approach for inferring shared constraints in a Constrained Markov Decision Process (CMDP) from a set of safe demonstrations with possibly different reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-05 David Lindner , Xin Chen , Sebastian Tschiatschek , Katja Hofmann , Andreas Krause

Offline goal-conditioned reinforcement learning (GCRL) is challenging in long-horizon tasks, where distant state--goal pairs provide weak supervision and value estimates become vulnerable to accumulated bootstrapping errors. Hierarchical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Kaiqiang Ke , Shenghong He , Chengdong Xu , Yuheng Luo , Xiangyuan Lan , Chao Yu

In this paper, we propose a novel hierarchical framework for robot navigation in dynamic environments with heterogeneous constraints. Our approach leverages a graph neural network trained via reinforcement learning (RL) to efficiently…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-07-24 Huajian Liu , Yixuan Feng , Wei Dong , Kunpeng Fan , Chao Wang , Yongzhuo Gao

Hierarchical reinforcement learning has been a compelling approach for achieving goal directed behavior over long sequences of actions. However, it has been challenging to implement in realistic or open-ended environments. A main challenge…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-22 Arun Ahuja , Kavya Kopparapu , Rob Fergus , Ishita Dasgupta

Hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) holds great potential for sample-efficient learning on challenging long-horizon tasks. In particular, letting a higher level assign subgoals to a lower level has been shown to enable fast learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-07 Nico Gürtler , Dieter Büchler , Georg Martius

Reinforcement learning (RL) often struggles to accomplish a sparse-reward long-horizon task in a complex environment. Goal-conditioned reinforcement learning (GCRL) has been employed to tackle this difficult problem via a curriculum of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-20 Lisheng Wu , Ke Chen

In this work, we propose a hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) structure which is capable of performing autonomous vehicle planning tasks in simulated environments with multiple sub-goals. In this hierarchical structure, the network…

Robotics · Computer Science 2019-11-12 Zhiqian Qiao , Zachariah Tyree , Priyantha Mudalige , Jeff Schneider , John M. Dolan