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To perform robot manipulation tasks, a low-dimensional state of the environment typically needs to be estimated. However, designing a state estimator can sometimes be difficult, especially in environments with deformable objects. An…

Robotics · Computer Science 2019-07-16 Xingyu Lin , Harjatin Singh Baweja , David Held

In recent years, reinforcement learning (RL) has shown great potential for solving tasks in well-defined environments like games or robotics. This paper aims to solve the robotic reaching task in a simulation run on the Neurorobotics…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-05-21 Marton Szep , Leander Lauenburg , Kevin Farkas , Xiyan Su , Chuanlong Zang

Many continuous control tasks have easily formulated objectives, yet using them directly as a reward in reinforcement learning (RL) leads to suboptimal policies. Therefore, many classical control tasks guide RL training using complex…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-21 Aleksandra Faust , Anthony Francis , Dar Mehta

This paper deals with robotic lever control using Explainable Deep Reinforcement Learning. First, we train a policy by using the Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient algorithm and the Hindsight Experience Replay technique, where the goal is…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-10-08 Sindre Benjamin Remman , Anastasios M. Lekkas

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a popular approach for robotic path planning in uncertain environments. However, the control policies trained for an RL agent crucially depend on user-defined, state-based reward functions. Poorly designed…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-12-05 Anand Balakrishnan , Stefan Jakšić , Edgar A. Aguilar , Dejan Ničković , Jyotirmoy V. Deshmukh

We investigate the problem of teaching a robot manipulator to perform dynamic non-prehensile object transport, also known as the `robot waiter' task, from a limited set of real-world demonstrations. We propose an approach that combines…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-12-03 Neel Jawale , Byron Boots , Balakumar Sundaralingam , Mohak Bhardwaj

This work proposes a novel model-free Reinforcement Learning (RL) agent that is able to learn how to complete an unknown task having access to only a part of the input observation. We take inspiration from the concepts of visual attention…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-16 Gonçalo Querido , Alberto Sardinha , Francisco S. Melo

Model-free deep reinforcement learning (RL) has demonstrated its superiority on many complex sequential decision-making problems. However, heavy dependence on dense rewards and high sample-complexity impedes the wide adoption of these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-04-02 Zhuangdi Zhu , Kaixiang Lin , Bo Dai , Jiayu Zhou

Connector insertion and many other tasks commonly found in modern manufacturing settings involve complex contact dynamics and friction. Since it is difficult to capture related physical effects with first-order modeling, traditional control…

Acquiring complex behaviors is essential for artificially intelligent agents, yet learning these behaviors in high-dimensional settings poses a significant challenge due to the vast search space. Traditional reinforcement learning (RL)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-22 Mert Albaba , Sammy Christen , Thomas Langarek , Christoph Gebhardt , Otmar Hilliges , Michael J. Black

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

Motivated by the challenge of achieving rapid learning in physical environments, this paper presents the development and training of a robotic system designed to navigate and solve a labyrinth game using model-based reinforcement learning…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-12-18 Thomas Bi , Raffaello D'Andrea

This paper studies the constrained/safe reinforcement learning (RL) problem with sparse indicator signals for constraint violations. We propose a model-based approach to enable RL agents to effectively explore the environment with unknown…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-03-09 Zuxin Liu , Hongyi Zhou , Baiming Chen , Sicheng Zhong , Martial Hebert , Ding Zhao

Although Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has been popular in many disciplines including robotics, state-of-the-art DRL algorithms still struggle to learn long-horizon, multi-step and sparse reward tasks, such as stacking several blocks…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-03-10 Xintong Yang , Ze Ji , Jing Wu , Yu-kun Lai

The use of sparse neural networks has seen rapid growth in recent years, particularly in computer vision. Their appeal stems largely from the reduced number of parameters required to train and store, as well as in an increase in learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-22 Laura Graesser , Utku Evci , Erich Elsen , Pablo Samuel Castro

Although deep reinforcement learning (DRL) algorithms have made important achievements in many control tasks, they still suffer from the problems of sample inefficiency and unstable training process, which are usually caused by sparse…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-02-28 Ke Lin , Liang Gong , Xudong Li , Te Sun , Binhao Chen , Chengliang Liu , Zhengfeng Zhang , Jian Pu , Junping Zhang

Deep reinforcement Learning for end-to-end driving is limited by the need of complex reward engineering. Sparse rewards can circumvent this challenge but suffers from long training time and leads to sub-optimal policy. In this work, we…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-08-03 Pranav Agarwal , Pierre de Beaucorps , Raoul de Charette

We study how to exploit dense simulator-defined rewards in vision-based autonomous driving without inheriting their misalignment with deployment metrics. In realistic simulators such as CARLA, privileged state (e.g., lane geometry,…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-12-30 Feeza Khan Khanzada , Jaerock Kwon

The problem of sparse rewards is one of the hardest challenges in contemporary reinforcement learning. Hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) tackles this problem by using a set of temporally-extended actions, or options, each of which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-14 Nat Dilokthanakul , Christos Kaplanis , Nick Pawlowski , Murray Shanahan

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) is one of the most powerful tools for synthesizing complex robotic behaviors. But training DRL models is incredibly compute and memory intensive, requiring large training datasets and replay buffers to…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-04-25 Lev Grossman , Brian Plancher