English
Related papers

Related papers: Explore to Generalize in Zero-Shot RL

200 papers

This paper studies the problem of autonomous exploration under localization uncertainty for a mobile robot with 3D range sensing. We present a framework for self-learning a high-performance exploration policy in a single simulation…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-05-12 Fanfei Chen , Paul Szenher , Yewei Huang , Jinkun Wang , Tixiao Shan , Shi Bai , Brendan Englot

Unsupervised pre-training can equip reinforcement learning agents with prior knowledge and accelerate learning in downstream tasks. A promising direction, grounded in human development, investigates agents that learn by setting and pursuing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-28 Octavio Pappalardo

In this work, we study offline reinforcement learning (RL) with zero-shot generalization property (ZSG), where the agent has access to an offline dataset including experiences from different environments, and the goal of the agent is to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-12 Zhiyong Wang , Chen Yang , John C. S. Lui , Dongruo Zhou

In the face of difficult exploration problems in reinforcement learning, we study whether giving an agent an object-centric mapping (describing a set of items and their attributes) allow for more efficient learning. We found this problem is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-15 Anthony GX-Chen , Kenneth Marino , Rob Fergus

In the zero-shot policy transfer (ZSPT) setting for contextual Markov decision processes (MDP), agents train on a fixed set of contexts and must generalise to new ones. Recent work has argued and demonstrated that increased exploration can…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-23 Max Weltevrede , Caroline Horsch , Matthijs T. J. Spaan , Wendelin Böhmer

Equilibrium learning in adversarial games is an important topic widely examined in the fields of game theory and reinforcement learning (RL). Pursuit-evasion game (PEG), as an important class of real-world games from the fields of robotics…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-15 Runyu Lu , Peng Zhang , Ruochuan Shi , Yuanheng Zhu , Dongbin Zhao , Yang Liu , Dong Wang , Cesare Alippi

The current dominant paradigm for imitation learning relies on strong supervision of expert actions to learn both 'what' and 'how' to imitate. We pursue an alternative paradigm wherein an agent first explores the world without any expert…

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has demonstrated remarkable success in solving sequential decision-making problems. However, in real-world scenarios, RL agents often struggle to generalize when faced with unseen actions that were not…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-13 Abdullah Alchihabi , Hanping Zhang , Yuhong Guo

Designing reward functions that generalize beyond controlled laboratory settings remains a fundamental challenge in reinforcement learning for robotics. In open-world manipulation problems, a single task can appear in numerous variants…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Tengye Xu , Yangting Sun , Ziju Shen , Guanqi Chen , Zhen Fu , Chen yizhou , Hua Chen , Jia Pan

Zero-shot reinforcement learning is necessary for extracting optimal policies in absence of concrete rewards for fast adaptation to future problem settings. Forward-backward representations (FB) have emerged as a promising method for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-09 Núria Armengol Urpí , Marin Vlastelica , Georg Martius , Stelian Coros

While reinforcement learning algorithms can learn effective policies for complex tasks, these policies are often brittle to even minor task variations, especially when variations are not explicitly provided during training. One natural…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-09 Saurabh Kumar , Aviral Kumar , Sergey Levine , Chelsea Finn

We study the problem of exploration in Reinforcement Learning and present a novel model-free solution. We adopt an information-theoretical viewpoint and start from the instance-specific lower bound of the number of samples that have to be…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-02 Alessio Russo , Alexandre Proutiere

Episodic training, where an agent's environment is reset after every success or failure, is the de facto standard when training embodied reinforcement learning (RL) agents. The underlying assumption that the environment can be easily reset…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-03-31 Zichen Zhang , Luca Weihs

Generalization in deep reinforcement learning over unseen environment variations usually requires policy learning over a large set of diverse training variations. We empirically observe that an agent trained on many variations (a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-28 Zhiwei Jia , Xuanlin Li , Zhan Ling , Shuang Liu , Yiran Wu , Hao Su

Deep reinforcement learning (RL) agents trained in a limited set of environments tend to suffer overfitting and fail to generalize to unseen testing environments. To improve their generalizability, data augmentation approaches (e.g. cutout…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-22 Kaixin Wang , Bingyi Kang , Jie Shao , Jiashi Feng

We study the challenging exploration incentive problem in both bandit and reinforcement learning, where the rewards are scale-free and potentially unbounded, driven by real-world scenarios and differing from existing work. Past works in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-07 Mengfan Xu , Diego Klabjan

Model free reinforcement learning suffers from the high sampling complexity inherent to robotic manipulation or locomotion tasks. Most successful approaches typically use random sampling strategies which leads to slow policy convergence. In…

Robotics · Computer Science 2019-08-13 Miroslav Bogdanovic , Ludovic Righetti

Generalizing skill policies to novel conditions remains a key challenge in robot learning. Imitation learning methods, while data-efficient, are largely confined to the training region and consistently fail on input data outside it, leading…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Serdar Bahar , Fatih Dogangun , Matteo Saveriano , Yukie Nagai , Emre Ugur

Generalization in Reinforcement Learning (RL) aims to learn an agent during training that generalizes to the target environment. This paper studies RL generalization from a theoretical aspect: how much can we expect pre-training over…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-30 Haotian Ye , Xiaoyu Chen , Liwei Wang , Simon S. Du

Standard supervised learning setting assumes that training data and test data come from the same distribution (domain). Domain generalization (DG) methods try to learn a model that when trained on data from multiple domains, would…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2020-08-18 Udit Maniyar , Joseph K J , Aniket Anand Deshmukh , Urun Dogan , Vineeth N Balasubramanian