Related papers: SuPLE: Robot Learning with Lyapunov Rewards
Many approaches to robot learning begin by inferring a reward function from a set of human demonstrations. To learn a good reward, it is necessary to determine which features of the environment are relevant before determining how these…
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,…
Exploration in environments with sparse rewards has been a persistent problem in reinforcement learning (RL). Many tasks are natural to specify with a sparse reward, and manually shaping a reward function can result in suboptimal…
Model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) is sample-efficient but struggles in sparse reward settings. A critical bottleneck arises from the lack of informative gradients in sparse settings, where standard reward models often yield flat…
Collaborative machine learning (ML) is an appealing paradigm to build high-quality ML models by training on the aggregated data from many parties. However, these parties are only willing to share their data when given enough incentives,…
Reinforcement learning algorithms are typically designed for discrete-time dynamics, even though the underlying real-world control systems are often continuous in time. In this paper, we study the problem of continuous-time reinforcement…
Preference-based Reinforcement Learning (PbRL) provides a way to learn high-performance policies in environments where the reward signal is hard to specify, avoiding heuristic and time-consuming reward design. However, PbRL can suffer from…
Automating robotic surgery via learning from demonstration (LfD) techniques is extremely challenging. This is because surgical tasks often involve sequential decision-making processes with complex interactions of physical objects and have…
Achieving highly dynamic behaviors on humanoid robots, such as running, requires controllers that are both robust and precise, and hence difficult to design. Classical control methods offer valuable insight into how such systems can…
Reinforcement learning, which acquires a policy maximizing long-term rewards, has been actively studied. Unfortunately, this learning type is too slow and difficult to use in practical situations because the state-action space becomes huge…
Reward shaping is a technique in reinforcement learning that addresses the sparse-reward problem by providing more frequent and informative rewards. We introduce a self-adaptive and highly efficient reward shaping mechanism that…
Reward shaping has been applied widely to accelerate Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents' training. However, a principled way of designing effective reward shaping functions, especially for complex continuous control problems, remains…
Designing reward functions that generalize beyond controlled laboratory settings remains a fundamental challenge in reinforcement learning for robotics. In open-world manipulation problems, a single task can appear in numerous variants…
We study reinforcement learning (RL) for decision processes with non-Markovian reward, in which high-level knowledge of the task in the form of reward machines is available to the learner. We consider probabilistic reward machines with…
Real-world reinforcement learning (RL) environments, whether in robotics or industrial settings, often involve non-visual observations and require not only efficient but also reliable and thus interpretable and flexible RL approaches. To…
In imitation and reinforcement learning, the cost of human supervision limits the amount of data that robots can be trained on. An aspirational goal is to construct self-improving robots: robots that can learn and improve on their own, from…
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…
Teaching robots novel skills with demonstrations via human-in-the-loop data collection techniques like kinesthetic teaching or teleoperation puts a heavy burden on human supervisors. In contrast to this paradigm, it is often significantly…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) has been widely used to solve tasks where the environment consistently provides a dense reward value. However, in real-world scenarios, rewards can often be poorly defined or sparse. Auxiliary signals are…
Model-free deep reinforcement learning (RL) has demonstrated its superiority on many complex sequential decision-making problems. However, heavy dependence on dense rewards and high sample-complexity impedes the wide adoption of these…