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Goal-conditioned reinforcement learning endows an agent with a large variety of skills, but it often struggles to solve tasks that require more temporally extended reasoning. In this work, we propose to incorporate imagined subgoals into…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-02 Elliot Chane-Sane , Cordelia Schmid , Ivan Laptev

We present relay policy learning, a method for imitation and reinforcement learning that can solve multi-stage, long-horizon robotic tasks. This general and universally-applicable, two-phase approach consists of an imitation learning stage…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-29 Abhishek Gupta , Vikash Kumar , Corey Lynch , Sergey Levine , Karol Hausman

In this paper we address the challenge of exploration in deep reinforcement learning for robotic manipulation tasks. In sparse goal settings, an agent does not receive any positive feedback until randomly achieving the goal, which becomes…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-02-23 Nikola Vulin , Sammy Christen , Stefan Stevsic , Otmar Hilliges

Legged robots must achieve both robust locomotion and energy efficiency to be practical in real-world environments. Yet controllers trained in simulation often fail to transfer reliably, and most existing approaches neglect…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-09-09 Filip Bjelonic , Fabian Tischhauser , Marco Hutter

In continuing tasks, average-reward reinforcement learning may be a more appropriate problem formulation than the more common discounted reward formulation. As usual, learning an optimal policy in this setting typically requires a large…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-01-18 Yuqian Jiang , Sudarshanan Bharadwaj , Bo Wu , Rishi Shah , Ufuk Topcu , Peter Stone

Defining reward functions for skill learning has been a long-standing challenge in robotics. Recently, vision-language models (VLMs) have shown promise in defining reward signals for teaching robots manipulation skills. However, existing…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-02-13 Kaifeng Zhang , Zhao-Heng Yin , Weirui Ye , Yang Gao

Operating directly from raw high dimensional sensory inputs like images is still a challenge for robotic control. Recently, Reinforcement Learning methods have been proposed to solve specific tasks end-to-end, from pixels to torques.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-01-07 Carlos Florensa , Jonas Degrave , Nicolas Heess , Jost Tobias Springenberg , Martin Riedmiller

There is a surge of interest in using formal languages such as Linear Temporal Logic (LTL) to precisely and succinctly specify complex tasks and derive reward functions for Reinforcement Learning (RL). However, existing methods often assign…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Minjae Kwon , Ingy ElSayed-Aly , Lu Feng

Reinforcement Learning has emerged as a strong alternative to solve optimization tasks efficiently. The use of these algorithms highly depends on the feedback signals provided by the environment in charge of informing about how good (or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-01 Alain Andres , Esther Villar-Rodriguez , Javier Del Ser

While reinforcement learning (RL) has been successful in natural language processing (NLP) domains such as dialogue generation and text-based games, it typically faces the problem of sparse rewards that leads to slow or no convergence.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-10-07 Ameet Deshpande , Eve Fleisig

Reinforcement learning optimizes policies for expected cumulative reward. Need the supervision be so narrow? Reward is delayed and sparse for many tasks, making it a difficult and impoverished signal for end-to-end optimization. To augment…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-03-10 Evan Shelhamer , Parsa Mahmoudieh , Max Argus , Trevor Darrell

While reinforcement learning provides an appealing formalism for learning individual skills, a general-purpose robotic system must be able to master an extensive repertoire of behaviors. Instead of learning a large collection of skills…

Robotics · Computer Science 2019-10-28 Ashvin Nair , Shikhar Bahl , Alexander Khazatsky , Vitchyr Pong , Glen Berseth , Sergey Levine

Most existing policy learning solutions require the learning agents to receive high-quality supervision signals such as well-designed rewards in reinforcement learning (RL) or high-quality expert demonstrations in behavioral cloning (BC).…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-03 Jingkang Wang , Hongyi Guo , Zhaowei Zhu , Yang Liu

Modern reinforcement learning algorithms can learn solutions to increasingly difficult control problems while at the same time reduce the amount of prior knowledge needed for their application. One of the remaining challenges is the…

This paper studies satisfaction of temporal properties on unknown stochastic processes that have continuous state spaces. We show how reinforcement learning (RL) can be applied for computing policies that are finite-memory and deterministic…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2020-09-29 Milad Kazemi , Sadegh Soudjani

Agents that can learn to imitate given video observation -- \emph{without direct access to state or action information} are more applicable to learning in the natural world. However, formulating a reinforcement learning (RL) agent that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-14 Glen Berseth , Florian Golemo , Christopher Pal

Reward function is essential in reinforcement learning (RL), serving as the guiding signal to incentivize agents to solve given tasks, however, is also notoriously difficult to design. In many cases, only imperfect rewards are available,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-06 Jianxiong Li , Xiao Hu , Haoran Xu , Jingjing Liu , Xianyuan Zhan , Qing-Shan Jia , Ya-Qin Zhang

Reinforcement learning problems are often described through rewards that indicate if an agent has completed some task. This specification can yield desirable behavior, however many problems are difficult to specify in this manner, as one…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2016-08-15 Ashley Edwards , Charles Isbell , Atsuo Takanishi

This paper presents an interpretable reward design framework for reinforcement learning based constrained optimal control problems with state and terminal constraints. The problem is formalized within a standard partially observable Markov…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-03-05 Jingjie Ni , Fangfei Li , Xin Jin , Xianlun Peng , Yang Tang

This paper bridges some of the gap between optimal planning and reinforcement learning (RL), both of which share roots in dynamic programming applied to sequential decision making or optimal control. Whereas planning typically favors…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Filip V. Georgiev , Kalle G. Timperi , Başak Sakçak , Steven M. LaValle