Related papers: State Representations as Incentives for Reinforcem…

In recent years, reinforcement learning (RL) has shown remarkable success in robotics when a fast and accurate simulator is available for a given task. When using RL and simulation, more simulator realism is generally beneficial but becomes…

For a robotic grasping task in which diverse unseen target objects exist in a cluttered environment, some deep learning-based methods have achieved state-of-the-art results using visual input directly. In contrast, actor-critic deep…

Learning robotic control policies in the real world gives rise to challenges in data efficiency, safety, and controlling the initial condition of the system. On the other hand, simulations are a useful alternative as they provide an…

In this work, we evaluate the effectiveness of representation learning approaches for decision making in visually complex environments. Representation learning is essential for effective reinforcement learning (RL) from high-dimensional…

One of the fundamental challenges in reinforcement learning (RL) is the one of data efficiency: modern algorithms require a very large number of training samples, especially compared to humans, for solving environments with high-dimensional…

The interpretation of spatial references is highly contextual, requiring joint inference over both language and the environment. We consider the task of spatial reasoning in a simulated environment, where an agent can act and receive…

State representation learning aims at learning compact representations from raw observations in robotics and control applications. Approaches used for this objective are auto-encoders, learning forward models, inverse dynamics or learning…

Representation learning methods are an important tool for addressing the challenges posed by complex observations spaces in sequential decision making problems. Recently, many methods have used a wide variety of types of approaches for…

Real-world reinforcement learning (RL) environments, whether in robotics or industrial settings, often involve non-visual observations and require not only efficient but also reliable and thus interpretable and flexible RL approaches. To…

Reinforcement learning has emerged as a promising methodology for training robot controllers. However, most results have been limited to simulation due to the need for a large number of samples and the lack of automated-yet-safe data…

State representation learning, or the ability to capture latent generative factors of an environment, is crucial for building intelligent agents that can perform a wide variety of tasks. Learning such representations without supervision…

Recent advances in reinforcement learning have shown its potential to tackle complex real-life tasks. However, as the dimensionality of the task increases, reinforcement learning methods tend to struggle. To overcome this, we explore…

Discovering an informative, or agent-centric, state representation that encodes only the relevant information while discarding the irrelevant is a key challenge towards scaling reinforcement learning algorithms and efficiently applying them…

For an autonomous agent to fulfill a wide range of user-specified goals at test time, it must be able to learn broadly applicable and general-purpose skill repertoires. Furthermore, to provide the requisite level of generality, these skills…

End-to-end reinforcement learning agents learn a state representation and a policy at the same time. Recurrent neural networks (RNNs) have been trained successfully as reinforcement learning agents in settings like dialogue that require…

Representation learning is a central challenge across a range of machine learning areas. In reinforcement learning, effective and functional representations have the potential to tremendously accelerate learning progress and solve more…

We analyze the hidden activations of neural network policies of deep reinforcement learning (RL) agents and show, empirically, that it's possible to know a priori if a state representation will lend itself to fast learning. RL agents in…

Collecting and automatically obtaining reward signals from real robotic visual data for the purposes of training reinforcement learning algorithms can be quite challenging and time-consuming. Methods for utilizing unlabeled data can have a…

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…

Tabular reinforcement learning methods cannot operate directly on continuous state spaces. One solution for this problem is to partition the state space. A good partitioning enables generalization during learning and more efficient…