English
Related papers

Related papers: Reward Machine Inference for Robotic Manipulation

200 papers

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a popular approach for robotic path planning in uncertain environments. However, the control policies trained for an RL agent crucially depend on user-defined, state-based reward functions. Poorly designed…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-12-05 Anand Balakrishnan , Stefan Jakšić , Edgar A. Aguilar , Dejan Ničković , Jyotirmoy V. Deshmukh

Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods have been proven successful in solving manipulation tasks autonomously. However, RL is still not widely adopted on real robotic systems because working with real hardware entails additional challenges,…

This paper presents a novel approach to Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) that combines cooperative task decomposition with the learning of reward machines (RMs) encoding the structure of the sub-tasks. The proposed method helps…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-02-17 Leo Ardon , Daniel Furelos-Blanco , Alessandra Russo

In reinforcement learning (RL), agents continually interact with the environment and use the feedback to refine their behavior. To guide policy optimization, reward models are introduced as proxies of the desired objectives, such that when…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-19 Rui Yu , Shenghua Wan , Yucen Wang , Chen-Xiao Gao , Le Gan , Zongzhang Zhang , De-Chuan Zhan

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have recently advanced robotic manipulation by leveraging vision for scene perception and language for instruction following. However, existing methods rely heavily on costly human-annotated training…

Current end-to-end deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) approaches require jointly learning perception, decision-making and low-level control from very sparse reward signals and high-dimensional inputs, with little capability of incorporating…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-10 Vibhavari Dasagi , Robert Lee , Serena Mou , Jake Bruce , Niko Sünderhauf , Jürgen Leitner

Reward specification plays a central role in reinforcement learning (RL), guiding the agent's behavior. To express non-Markovian rewards, formalisms such as reward machines have been introduced to capture dependencies on histories. However,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Rajarshi Roy , Anirban Majumdar , Ritam Raha , David Parker , Marta Kwiatkowska

Learning behavior in legged robots presents a significant challenge due to its inherent instability and complex constraints. Recent research has proposed the use of a large language model (LLM) to generate reward functions in reinforcement…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-07-01 Runhao Zeng , Dingjie Zhou , Qiwei Liang , Junlin Liu , Hui Li , Changxin Huang , Jianqiang Li , Xiping Hu , Fuchun Sun

Methods for learning from demonstration (LfD) have shown success in acquiring behavior policies by imitating a user. However, even for a single task, LfD may require numerous demonstrations. For versatile agents that must learn many tasks…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-04 Jorge A. Mendez , Shashank Shivkumar , Eric Eaton

Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) infers a reward function from demonstrations, allowing for policy improvement and generalization. However, despite much recent interest in IRL, little work has been done to understand the minimum set of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-08-19 Daniel S. Brown , Scott Niekum

Tasks with complex temporal structures and long horizons pose a challenge for reinforcement learning agents due to the difficulty in specifying the tasks in terms of reward functions as well as large variances in the learning signals. We…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-09-27 Xiao Li , Yao Ma , Calin Belta

Explaining the behaviour of intelligent agents learned by reinforcement learning (RL) to humans is challenging yet crucial due to their incomprehensible proprioceptive states, variational intermediate goals, and resultant unpredictability.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-07 Wenhao Lu , Xufeng Zhao , Sven Magg , Martin Gromniak , Mengdi Li , Stefan Wermter

Interactive adaptive systems powered by Reinforcement Learning (RL) have many potential applications, such as intelligent tutoring systems. In such systems there is typically an external human system designer that is creating, monitoring…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-04-06 Ramtin Keramati , Emma Brunskill

Deep Reinforcement Learning has enabled the learning of policies for complex tasks in partially observable environments, without explicitly learning the underlying model of the tasks. While such model-free methods achieve considerable…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-01-11 Tanmay Shankar , Santosha K. Dwivedy , Prithwijit Guha

In recent years, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) related technology has expanded knowledge in the area, bringing to light new problems and challenges that require solutions. Furthermore, because the technology allows processes usually carried…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-12-08 Cristian Millán-Arias , Ruben Contreras , Francisco Cruz , Bruno Fernandes

Reinforcement learning is a promising framework for solving control problems, but its use in practical situations is hampered by the fact that reward functions are often difficult to engineer. Specifying goals and tasks for autonomous…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-02-22 Justin Fu , Anoop Korattikara , Sergey Levine , Sergio Guadarrama

We study reinforcement learning (RL) problems in which agents observe the reward or transition realizations at their current state before deciding which action to take. Such observations are available in many applications, including…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-22 Nadav Merlis

Reinforcement learning (RL), a common tool in decision making, learns control policies from various experiences based on the associated cumulative return/rewards without treating them differently. Humans, on the contrary, often learn to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-25 Mingkang Wu , Devin White , Vernon Lawhern , Nicholas R. Waytowich , Yongcan Cao

Despite the fact that deep reinforcement learning (RL) has surpassed human-level performances in various tasks, it still has several fundamental challenges. First, most RL methods require intensive data from the exploration of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-06 Zhe Xu , Bo Wu , Aditya Ojha , Daniel Neider , Ufuk Topcu

Learning from Demonstration (LfD) seeks to democratize robotics by enabling non-roboticist end-users to teach robots to perform a task by providing a human demonstration. However, modern LfD techniques, e.g. inverse reinforcement learning…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-11-24 Letian Chen , Rohan Paleja , Matthew Gombolay