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Designing an effective reward function has long been a challenge in reinforcement learning, particularly for complex tasks in unstructured environments. To address this, various learning paradigms have emerged that leverage different forms…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-29 Muhammad Qasim Elahi , Somtochukwu Oguchienti , Maheed H. Ahmed , Mahsa Ghasemi

We propose a general and model-free approach for Reinforcement Learning (RL) on real robotics with sparse rewards. We build upon the Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (DDPG) algorithm to use demonstrations. Both demonstrations and actual…

Offline preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL) provides an effective way to overcome the challenges of designing reward and the high costs of online interaction. However, since labeling preference needs real-time human feedback,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Xiao-Yin Liu , Guotao Li , Xiao-Hu Zhou , Zeng-Guang Hou

Human guidance has emerged as a powerful tool for enhancing reinforcement learning (RL). However, conventional forms of guidance such as demonstrations or binary scalar feedback can be challenging to collect or have low information content,…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-07-08 Giulio Schiavi , Andrei Cramariuc , Lionel Ott , Roland Siegwart

While reinforcement learning (RL) has the potential to enable robots to autonomously acquire a wide range of skills, in practice, RL usually requires manual, per-task engineering of reward functions, especially in real world settings where…

Robotics · Computer Science 2019-02-15 Tianhe Yu , Gleb Shevchuk , Dorsa Sadigh , Chelsea Finn

Reinforcement learning provides a general framework for learning robotic skills while minimizing engineering effort. However, most reinforcement learning algorithms assume that a well-designed reward function is provided, and learn a single…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-04-28 Archit Sharma , Michael Ahn , Sergey Levine , Vikash Kumar , Karol Hausman , Shixiang Gu

Imitation learning enables autonomous agents to learn from human examples, without the need for a reward signal. Still, if the provided dataset does not encapsulate the task correctly, or when the task is too complex to be modeled, such…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-06-10 Federico Malato , Ville Hautamaki

While robot learning has demonstrated promising results for enabling robots to automatically acquire new skills, a critical challenge in deploying learning-based systems is scale: acquiring enough data for the robot to effectively…

Designing reward functions for continuous-control robotics often leads to subtle misalignments or reward hacking, especially in complex tasks. Preference-based RL mitigates some of these pitfalls by learning rewards from comparative…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-03-19 Anukriti Singh , Amisha Bhaskar , Peihong Yu , Souradip Chakraborty , Ruthwik Dasyam , Amrit Bedi , Pratap Tokekar

Reinforcement learning systems have the potential to enable continuous improvement in unstructured environments, leveraging data collected autonomously. However, in practice these systems require significant amounts of instrumentation or…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-03-30 Abhishek Gupta , Corey Lynch , Brandon Kinman , Garrett Peake , Sergey Levine , Karol Hausman

Training automated agents to complete complex tasks in interactive environments is challenging: reinforcement learning requires careful hand-engineering of reward functions, imitation learning requires specialized infrastructure and access…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-21 Olivia Watkins , Trevor Darrell , Pieter Abbeel , Jacob Andreas , Abhishek Gupta

In this paper, we combine task-dependent reward shaping and task-independent proto-value functions to obtain reward dependent proto-value functions (RPVFs). In constructing the RPVFs we are making use of the immediate rewards which are…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2015-11-30 Chandrashekar Lakshmi Narayanan , Raj Kumar Maity , Shalabh Bhatnagar

Due to burdensome data requirements, learning from demonstration often falls short of its promise to allow users to quickly and naturally program robots. Demonstrations are inherently ambiguous and incomplete, making correct generalization…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-04-29 Wonjoon Goo , Scott Niekum

In many learning tasks, certain requirements on the processing of individual data samples should arguably be formalized as strict constraints in the underlying optimization problem, rather than by means of arbitrary penalties. We show that,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-26 Francesca Lanzillotta , Chiara Albisani , Davide Pucci , Daniele Baracchi , Alessandro Piva , Matteo Lapucci

Offline reinforcement learning can enable policy learning from pre-collected, sub-optimal datasets without online interactions. This makes it ideal for real-world robots and safety-critical scenarios, where collecting online data or expert…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-08-07 Sreyas Venkataraman , Yufei Wang , Ziyu Wang , Navin Sriram Ravie , Zackory Erickson , David Held

A major bottleneck in imitation learning is the requirement of a large number of expert demonstrations, which can be expensive or inaccessible. Learning from supplementary demonstrations without strict quality requirements has emerged as a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-31 Jiangdong Fan , Hongcai He , Paul Weng , Hui Xu , Jie Shao

The combination of deep neural network models and reinforcement learning algorithms can make it possible to learn policies for robotic behaviors that directly read in raw sensory inputs, such as camera images, effectively subsuming both…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-17 Avi Singh , Larry Yang , Kristian Hartikainen , Chelsea Finn , Sergey Levine

Value-based reinforcement-learning algorithms provide state-of-the-art results in model-free discrete-action settings, and tend to outperform actor-critic algorithms. We argue that actor-critic algorithms are limited by their need for an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-13 Denis Steckelmacher , Hélène Plisnier , Diederik M. Roijers , Ann Nowé

In this paper, we revisit variational intrinsic control (VIC), an unsupervised reinforcement learning method for finding the largest set of intrinsic options available to an agent. In the original work by Gregor et al. (2016), two VIC…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-18 Taehwan Kwon

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-03-16 Kamil Ciosek