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Long-horizon tasks in robotic manipulation present significant challenges in reinforcement learning (RL) due to the difficulty of designing dense reward functions and effectively exploring the expansive state-action space. However, despite…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-06 Adrià López Escoriza , Nicklas Hansen , Stone Tao , Tongzhou Mu , Hao Su

Single-task RL agents are typically trained under a fixed reward function, which limits their robustness to reward misspecification and their ability to adapt to changing preferences. We introduce Reward-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Michal Nauman , Marek Cygan , Pieter Abbeel

Learned representations in deep reinforcement learning (DRL) have to extract task-relevant information from complex observations, balancing between robustness to distraction and informativeness to the policy. Such stable and rich…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-28 Mete Kemertas , Tristan Aumentado-Armstrong

Improving sample efficiency is central to Reinforcement Learning (RL), especially in environments where the rewards are sparse. Some recent approaches have proposed to specify reward functions as manually designed or learned reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-26 Shuai Han , Mehdi Dastani , Shihan Wang

Reinforcement learning (RL) methods with a high replay ratio (RR) and regularization have gained interest due to their superior sample efficiency. However, these methods have mainly been developed for dense-reward tasks. In this paper, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-12 Takuya Hiraoka

For task-oriented dialog systems, training a Reinforcement Learning (RL) based Dialog Management module suffers from low sample efficiency and slow convergence speed due to the sparse rewards in RL.To solve this problem, many strategies…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-04-13 Zhengxu Hou , Bang Liu , Ruihui Zhao , Zijing Ou , Yafei Liu , Xi Chen , Yefeng Zheng

Reward shaping is an effective technique for incorporating domain knowledge into reinforcement learning (RL). Existing approaches such as potential-based reward shaping normally make full use of a given shaping reward function. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-06 Yujing Hu , Weixun Wang , Hangtian Jia , Yixiang Wang , Yingfeng Chen , Jianye Hao , Feng Wu , Changjie Fan

Reward design is a fundamental problem in reinforcement learning (RL). A misspecified or poorly designed reward can result in low sample efficiency and undesired behaviors. In this paper, we propose the idea of programmatic reward design,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-10 Weichao Zhou , Wenchao Li

Goal-conditioned reinforcement learning (RL) is a promising direction for training agents that are capable of solving multiple tasks and reach a diverse set of objectives. How to \textit{specify} and \textit{ground} these goals in such a…

Teaching agents to follow complex written instructions has been an important yet elusive goal. One technique for enhancing learning efficiency is language reward shaping (LRS). Within a reinforcement learning (RL) framework, LRS involves…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-08-21 Sukai Huang , Nir Lipovetzky , Trevor Cohn

Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has emerged as a powerful model-free paradigm for learning optimal policies. However, in navigation tasks with cluttered environments, DRL methods often suffer from insufficient exploration, especially…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-07-04 Licheng Luo , Mingyu Cai

In standard reinforcement learning (RL), a learning agent seeks to optimize the overall reward. However, many key aspects of a desired behavior are more naturally expressed as constraints. For instance, the designer may want to limit the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-29 Sobhan Miryoosefi , Kianté Brantley , Hal Daumé , Miroslav Dudik , Robert Schapire

We consider the problem of learning from sparse and underspecified rewards, where an agent receives a complex input, such as a natural language instruction, and needs to generate a complex response, such as an action sequence, while only…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-23 Rishabh Agarwal , Chen Liang , Dale Schuurmans , Mohammad Norouzi

As the operations of autonomous systems generally affect simultaneously several users, it is crucial that their designs account for fairness considerations. In contrast to standard (deep) reinforcement learning (RL), we investigate the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-08-19 Umer Siddique , Paul Weng , Matthieu Zimmer

As a pivotal component to attaining generalizable solutions in human intelligence, reasoning provides great potential for reinforcement learning (RL) agents' generalization towards varied goals by summarizing part-to-whole arguments and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-18 Wenhao Ding , Haohong Lin , Bo Li , Ding Zhao

Rewards play an essential role in reinforcement learning. In contrast to rule-based game environments with well-defined reward functions, complex real-world robotic applications, such as contact-rich manipulation, lack explicit and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-30 Yuning Wu , Jieliang Luo , Hui Li

In the field of safe reinforcement learning (RL), finding a balance between satisfying safety constraints and optimizing reward performance presents a significant challenge. A key obstacle in this endeavor is the estimation of safety…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-14 Zhepeng Cen , Yihang Yao , Zuxin Liu , Ding Zhao

Transfer of recent advances in deep reinforcement learning to real-world applications is hindered by high data demands and thus low efficiency and scalability. Through independent improvements of components such as replay buffers or more…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-28 André Eberhard , Houssam Metni , Georg Fahland , Alexander Stroh , Pascal Friederich

Goal-conditioned and Multi-Task Reinforcement Learning (GCRL and MTRL) address numerous problems related to robot learning, including locomotion, navigation, and manipulation scenarios. Recent works focusing on language-defined robotic…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-06-21 Julien Perez , Denys Proux , Claude Roux , Michael Niemaz

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…