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Reinforcement Learning (RL) has been shown to be effective in many scenarios. However, it typically requires the exploration of a sufficiently large number of state-action pairs, some of which may be unsafe. Consequently, its application to…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2022-06-24 Yousef Emam , Gennaro Notomista , Paul Glotfelter , Zsolt Kira , Magnus Egerstedt

This paper investigates the so-called reward-balancing methods, a novel class of algorithms for solving discounted-return reinforcement learning (RL) problems. These methods consist of iteratively adjusting the reward function to transform…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-23 Simone Baroncini , Bahman Gharesifard , Giuseppe Notarstefano

Observing a human demonstrator manipulate objects provides a rich, scalable and inexpensive source of data for learning robotic policies. However, transferring skills from human videos to a robotic manipulator poses several challenges, not…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-03-08 Minttu Alakuijala , Gabriel Dulac-Arnold , Julien Mairal , Jean Ponce , Cordelia Schmid

This paper explores multiple optimization methods to improve the performance of rating-based reinforcement learning (RbRL). RbRL, a method based on the idea of human ratings, has been developed to infer reward functions in reward-free…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-15 Evelyn Rose , Devin White , Mingkang Wu , Vernon Lawhern , Nicholas R. Waytowich , Yongcan Cao

Several earlier studies have shown impressive control performance in complex robotic systems by designing the controller using a neural network and training it with model-free reinforcement learning. However, these outstanding controllers…

Video generation models trained on heterogeneous data with likelihood-surrogate objectives can produce visually plausible rollouts that violate physical constraints in embodied manipulation. Although reinforcement-learning post-training…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Zhenyang Ni , Yijiang Li , Ruochen Jiao , Simon Sinong Zhan , Sipeng Chen , Zhenfei Yin , Minshuo Chen , Philip Torr , Zhaoran Wang , Qi Zhu

Generating physical movement behaviours from their symbolic description is a long-standing challenge in artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics, requiring insights into numerical optimization methods as well as into formalizations from…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-12-19 Daniel Harnack , Christoph Lüth , Lukas Gross , Shivesh Kumar , Frank Kirchner

We present a deep reinforcement learning (deep RL) algorithm that consists of learning-based motion planning and imitation to tackle challenging control problems. Deep RL has been an effective tool for solving many high-dimensional…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-03-02 Nitish Sontakke , Sehoon Ha

Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) is the task of learning a single reward function given a Markov Decision Process (MDP) without defining the reward function, and a set of demonstrations generated by humans/experts. However, in practice,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-12-18 Siddharthan Rajasekaran , Jinwei Zhang , Jie Fu

Current reinforcement learning (RL) methods can successfully learn single tasks but often generalize poorly to modest perturbations in task domain or training procedure. In this work, we present a decoupled learning strategy for RL that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-05-10 Amy Zhang , Harsh Satija , Joelle Pineau

We present a map-less path planning algorithm based on Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) for mobile robots navigating in unknown environment that only relies on 40-dimensional raw laser data and odometry information. The planner is trained…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-02-12 Nicolò Botteghi , Beril Sirmacek , Khaled A. A. Mustafa , Mannes Poel , Stefano Stramigioli

Reward shaping is critical in reinforcement learning (RL), particularly for complex tasks where sparse rewards can hinder learning. However, choosing effective shaping rewards from a set of reward functions in a computationally efficient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-26 Chen Bo Calvin Zhang , Zhang-Wei Hong , Aldo Pacchiano , Pulkit Agrawal

Episodic tasks in Reinforcement Learning (RL) often pose challenges due to sparse reward signals and high-dimensional state spaces, which hinder efficient learning. Additionally, these tasks often feature hidden "trap states" --…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-23 Yuxuan Li , Yicheng Gao , Ning Yang , Stephen Xia

This paper tackles the challenging task of maintaining formation among multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) while avoiding both static and dynamic obstacles during directed flight. The complexity of the task arises from its…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Yuqing Xie , Chao Yu , Hongzhi Zang , Feng Gao , Wenhao Tang , Jingyi Huang , Jiayu Chen , Botian Xu , Yi Wu , Yu Wang

Reward specification is a notoriously difficult problem in reinforcement learning, requiring extensive expert supervision to design robust reward functions. Imitation learning (IL) methods attempt to circumvent these problems by utilizing…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-10-13 Sumedh A Sontakke , Jesse Zhang , Sébastien M. R. Arnold , Karl Pertsch , Erdem Bıyık , Dorsa Sadigh , Chelsea Finn , Laurent Itti

Recent advances have shown that video generation models can enhance robot learning by deriving effective robot actions through inverse dynamics. However, these methods heavily depend on the quality of generated data and struggle with…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-08-18 Kelin Yu , Sheng Zhang , Harshit Soora , Furong Huang , Heng Huang , Pratap Tokekar , Ruohan Gao

Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has shown its promising capabilities to learn optimal policies directly from trial and error. However, learning can be hindered if the goal of the learning, defined by the reward function, is "not optimal".…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2019-10-09 Yizheng Zhang , Andre Rosendo

Reward Machines (RMs) are an established mechanism in Reinforcement Learning (RL) to represent and learn sparse, temporally extended tasks with non-Markovian rewards. RMs rely on high-level information in the form of labels that are emitted…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-04 Thomas Krug , Daniel Neider

In high-dimensional state spaces, the usefulness of Reinforcement Learning (RL) is limited by the problem of exploration. This issue has been addressed using potential-based reward shaping (PB-RS) previously. In the present work, we…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-07-15 Ingmar Schubert , Ozgur S. Oguz , Marc Toussaint

With the increasing presence of robots in our every-day environments, improving their social skills is of utmost importance. Nonetheless, social robotics still faces many challenges. One bottleneck is that robotic behaviors need to be often…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-08-08 Anand Ballou , Xavier Alameda-Pineda , Chris Reinke