English
Related papers

Related papers: SuPLE: Robot Learning with Lyapunov Rewards

200 papers

One major limitation to the applicability of Reinforcement Learning (RL) to many practical domains is the large number of samples required to learn an optimal policy. To address this problem and improve learning efficiency, we consider a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-07 Roberto Cipollone , Giuseppe De Giacomo , Marco Favorito , Luca Iocchi , Fabio Patrizi

While recent progress in deep reinforcement learning has enabled robots to learn complex behaviors, tasks with long horizons and sparse rewards remain an ongoing challenge. In this work, we propose an effective reward shaping method through…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-04 Xingyu Lu , Stas Tiomkin , Pieter Abbeel

Reward design remains a significant bottleneck in applying reinforcement learning (RL) to real-world problems. A popular alternative is reward learning, where reward functions are inferred from human feedback rather than manually specified.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-16 Chaitanya Kharyal , Calarina Muslimani , Matthew E. Taylor

A new approach for efficiently exploring the configuration space and computing the free energy of large atomic and molecular systems is proposed, motivated by an analogy with reinforcement learning. There are two major components in this…

Chemical Physics · Physics 2018-04-18 Linfeng Zhang , Han Wang , Weinan E

Designing effective reward functions is crucial to training reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms. However, this design is non-trivial, even for domain experts, due to the subjective nature of certain tasks that are hard to quantify…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2025-05-26 Rishi Hazra , Alkis Sygkounas , Andreas Persson , Amy Loutfi , Pedro Zuidberg Dos Martires

In the search for more sample-efficient reinforcement-learning (RL) algorithms, a promising direction is to leverage as much external off-policy data as possible. For instance, expert demonstrations. In the past, multiple ideas have been…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-01 Jesus Bujalance Martin , Fabien Moutarde

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

Reward design remains a critical bottleneck in visual reinforcement learning (RL) for robotic manipulation. In simulated environments, rewards are conventionally designed based on the distance to a target position. However, such precise…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-29 Nan Tang , Jing-Cheng Pang , Guanlin Li , Chao Qian , Yang Yu

Conveying complex objectives to reinforcement learning (RL) agents often requires meticulous reward engineering. Preference-based RL methods are able to learn a more flexible reward model based on human preferences by actively incorporating…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-26 Xinran Liang , Katherine Shu , Kimin Lee , Pieter Abbeel

Robots can learn the right reward function by querying a human expert. Existing approaches attempt to choose questions where the robot is most uncertain about the human's response; however, they do not consider how easy it will be for the…

Robotics · Computer Science 2019-10-11 Erdem Bıyık , Malayandi Palan , Nicholas C. Landolfi , Dylan P. Losey , Dorsa Sadigh

Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) has progressed significantly toward accurately learning the underlying rewards in both discrete and continuous domains from behavior data. The next advance is to learn {\em intrinsic} preferences in ways…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Yikang Gui , Prashant Doshi

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

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

Data generation and labeling are often expensive in robot learning. Preference-based learning is a concept that enables reliable labeling by querying users with preference questions. Active querying methods are commonly employed in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-27 Erdem Bıyık , Nima Anari , Dorsa Sadigh

The need for rapid and reliable robot deployment is on the rise. Imitation Learning (IL) has become popular for producing motion planning policies from a set of demonstrations. However, many methods in IL are not guaranteed to produce…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-11-17 Alexandre Coulombe , Hsiu-Chin Lin

Reinforcement learning (RL) has achieved some impressive recent successes in various computer games and simulations. Most of these successes are based on having large numbers of episodes from which the agent can learn. In typical robotic…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-01-05 Jonas Tebbe , Lukas Krauch , Yapeng Gao , Andreas Zell

Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms assume that users specify tasks by manually writing down a reward function. However, this process can be laborious and demands considerable technical expertise. Can we devise RL algorithms that instead…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-03 Benjamin Eysenbach , Sergey Levine , Ruslan Salakhutdinov

Reinforcement Learning is a highly active research field with promising advancements. In the field of autonomous driving, however, often very simple scenarios are being examined. Common approaches use non-interpretable control commands as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-06 Daniel Bogdoll , Jing Qin , Moritz Nekolla , Ahmed Abouelazm , Tim Joseph , J. Marius Zöllner

The deployment of Reinforcement Learning to robotics applications faces the difficulty of reward engineering. Therefore, approaches have focused on creating reward functions by Learning from Observations (LfO) which is the task of learning…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-03-07 Milan Ganai , Chiaki Hirayama , Ya-Chien Chang , Sicun Gao

In many real-world scenarios, reward signal for agents are exceedingly sparse, making it challenging to learn an effective reward function for reward shaping. To address this issue, the proposed approach in this paper performs reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-18 Wenyun Li , Wenjie Huang , Chen Sun