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Related papers: PIPER: Primitive-Informed Preference-based Hierarc…

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Meta-reinforcement learning (meta-RL) algorithms allow for agents to learn new behaviors from small amounts of experience, mitigating the sample inefficiency problem in RL. However, while meta-RL agents can adapt quickly to new tasks at…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-26 Michael Wan , Jian Peng , Tanmay Gangwani

Efficient learning in the environment with sparse rewards is one of the most important challenges in Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL). In continuous DRL environments such as robotic arms control, Hindsight Experience Replay (HER) has been…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-02-07 Qiwei He , Liansheng Zhuang , Houqiang Li

The effectiveness of reinforcement learning (RL) agents in continuous control robotics tasks is mainly dependent on the design of the underlying reward function, which is highly prone to reward hacking. A misalignment between the reward…

The correct specification of reward models is a well-known challenge in reinforcement learning. Hand-crafted reward functions often lead to inefficient or suboptimal policies and may not be aligned with user values. Reinforcement learning…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-10-24 Muhan Lin , Shuyang Shi , Yue Guo , Behdad Chalaki , Vaishnav Tadiparthi , Ehsan Moradi Pari , Simon Stepputtis , Joseph Campbell , Katia Sycara

The complexity of designing reward functions has been a major obstacle to the wide application of deep reinforcement learning (RL) techniques. Describing an agent's desired behaviors and properties can be difficult, even for experts. A new…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-09 Wanqi Xue , Bo An , Shuicheng Yan , Zhongwen Xu

In reinforcement learning (RL), experience replay-based sampling techniques play a crucial role in promoting convergence by eliminating spurious correlations. However, widely used methods such as uniform experience replay (UER) and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-07 Ramnath Kumar , Dheeraj Nagaraj

Human-designed reward functions for reinforcement learning (RL) agents are frequently misaligned with the humans' true, unobservable objectives, and thus act only as proxies. Optimizing for a misspecified proxy reward function often induces…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-30 Stephane Hatgis-Kessell , Logan Mondal Bhamidipaty , Emma Brunskill

In reinforcement learning from human feedback, preference-based reward models play a central role in aligning large language models to human-aligned behavior. However, recent studies show that these models are prone to reward hacking and…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-23 Wenqian Ye , Guangtao Zheng , Aidong Zhang

A well-defined reward function is crucial for successful training of an reinforcement learning (RL) agent. However, defining a suitable reward function is a notoriously challenging task, especially in complex, multi-objective environments.…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-08-31 Jasmina Gajcin , James McCarthy , Rahul Nair , Radu Marinescu , Elizabeth Daly , Ivana Dusparic

Humans can leverage hierarchical structures to split a task into sub-tasks and solve problems efficiently. Both imitation and reinforcement learning or a combination of them with hierarchical structures have been proven to be an efficient…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-12-15 Yaru Niu , Yijun Gu

In Hindsight Experience Replay (HER), a reinforcement learning agent is trained by treating whatever it has achieved as virtual goals. However, in previous work, the experience was replayed at random, without considering which episode might…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-05-26 Rui Zhao , Volker Tresp

Exploration with sparse rewards remains a challenging research problem in reinforcement learning (RL). Especially for sequential object manipulation tasks, the RL agent always receives negative rewards until completing all sub-tasks, which…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-11-04 Yongle Luo , Yuxin Wang , Kun Dong , Qiang Zhang , Erkang Cheng , Zhiyong Sun , Bo Song

Oftentimes, environments for sequential decision-making problems can be quite sparse in the provision of evaluative feedback to guide reinforcement-learning agents. In the extreme case, long trajectories of behavior are merely punctuated…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-22 Akash Velu , Skanda Vaidyanath , Dilip Arumugam

Deep learning has achieved remarkable successes in solving challenging reinforcement learning (RL) problems when dense reward function is provided. However, in sparse reward environment it still often suffers from the need to carefully…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-02-19 Hao Liu , Alexander Trott , Richard Socher , Caiming Xiong

Interactive reinforcement learning has shown promise in learning complex robotic tasks. However, the process can be human-intensive due to the requirement of a large amount of interactive feedback. This paper presents a new method that uses…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-08-08 Shukai Liu , Chenming Wu , Ying Li , Liangjun Zhang

Hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) leverages temporal abstraction to efficiently tackle complex long-horizon tasks. However, HRL often collapses because the continual updates of the low-level primitive make earlier sub-goals issued…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-19 Utsav Singh , Vinay P. Namboodiri

To create useful reinforcement learning (RL) agents, step zero is to design a suitable reward function that captures the nuances of the task. However, reward engineering can be a difficult and time-consuming process. Instead,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-09 Calarina Muslimani , Matthew E. Taylor

Reward design in reinforcement learning and optimal control is challenging. Preference-based alignment addresses this by enabling agents to learn rewards from ranked trajectory pairs provided by humans. However, existing methods often…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-29 Zhixian Xie , Haode Zhang , Yizhe Feng , Wanxin Jin

Reinforcement Learning (RL) struggles in problems with delayed rewards, and one approach is to segment the task into sub-tasks with incremental rewards. We propose a framework called Hierarchical Inverse Reinforcement Learning (HIRL), which…

Robotics · Computer Science 2016-04-25 Sanjay Krishnan , Animesh Garg , Richard Liaw , Lauren Miller , Florian T. Pokorny , Ken Goldberg

Experience replay enables data-efficient learning from past experiences in online reinforcement learning agents. Traditionally, experiences were sampled uniformly from a replay buffer, regardless of differences in experience-specific…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-16 Leonard S. Pleiss , Tobias Sutter , Maximilian Schiffer