Related papers: Backward Learning for Goal-Conditioned Policies
Reinforcement learning offers the promise of automating the acquisition of complex behavioral skills. However, compared to commonly used and well-understood supervised learning methods, reinforcement learning algorithms can be brittle,…
Sparse reward problems are one of the biggest challenges in Reinforcement Learning. Goal-directed tasks are one such sparse reward problems where a reward signal is received only when the goal is reached. One promising way to train an agent…
Goals for reinforcement learning problems are typically defined through hand-specified rewards. To design such problems, developers of learning algorithms must inherently be aware of what the task goals are, yet we often require agents to…
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…
Traditional reinforcement learning agents learn from experience, past or present, gained through interaction with their environment. Our approach synthesizes experience, without requiring an agent to interact with their environment, by…
Many real-world robot learning problems, such as pick-and-place or arriving at a destination, can be seen as a problem of reaching a goal state as soon as possible. These problems, when formulated as episodic reinforcement learning tasks,…
Designing rewards for Reinforcement Learning (RL) is challenging because it needs to convey the desired task, be efficient to optimize, and be easy to compute. The latter is particularly problematic when applying RL to robotics, where…
Learning to control an environment without hand-crafted rewards or expert data remains challenging and is at the frontier of reinforcement learning research. We present an unsupervised learning algorithm to train agents to achieve…
Many relevant tasks require an agent to reach a certain state, or to manipulate objects into a desired configuration. For example, we might want a robot to align and assemble a gear onto an axle or insert and turn a key in a lock. These…
A reinforcement learning agent that needs to pursue different goals across episodes requires a goal-conditional policy. In addition to their potential to generalize desirable behavior to unseen goals, such policies may also enable…
In this paper, we study an inverse reinforcement learning problem that involves learning the reward function of a learning agent using trajectory data collected while this agent is learning its optimal policy. To address this problem, we…
Reinforcement learning is a promising framework for solving control problems, but its use in practical situations is hampered by the fact that reward functions are often difficult to engineer. Specifying goals and tasks for autonomous…
Current reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms can be brittle and difficult to use, especially when learning goal-reaching behaviors from sparse rewards. Although supervised imitation learning provides a simple and stable alternative, it…
Policy learning for partially observed control tasks requires policies that can remember salient information from past observations. In this paper, we present a method for learning policies with internal memory for high-dimensional,…
Solving goal-oriented tasks is an important but challenging problem in reinforcement learning (RL). For such tasks, the rewards are often sparse, making it difficult to learn a policy effectively. To tackle this difficulty, we propose a new…
Model-based next state prediction and state value prediction are slow to converge. To address these challenges, we do the following: i) Instead of a neural network, we do model-based planning using a parallel memory retrieval system (which…
Reinforcement learning algorithms describe how an agent can learn an optimal action policy in a sequential decision process, through repeated experience. In a given environment, the agent policy provides him some running and terminal…
Imitation learning algorithms learn a policy from demonstrations of expert behavior. We show that, for deterministic experts, imitation learning can be done by reduction to reinforcement learning with a stationary reward. Our theoretical…
Reinforcement learning with sparse rewards is challenging because an agent can rarely obtain non-zero rewards and hence, gradient-based optimization of parameterized policies can be incremental and slow. Recent work demonstrated that using…
We consider the problem of reinforcement learning when provided with (1) a baseline control policy and (2) a set of constraints that the learner must satisfy. The baseline policy can arise from demonstration data or a teacher agent and may…