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Related papers: Flattening Hierarchies with Policy Bootstrapping

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We propose a novel hierarchical reinforcement learning framework for quadruped locomotion over challenging terrain. Our approach incorporates a two-layer hierarchy in which a high-level policy (HLP) selects optimal goals for a low-level…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-06-26 Jeremiah Coholich , Muhammad Ali Murtaza , Seth Hutchinson , Zsolt Kira

Deep reinforcement learning (RL) uses model-free techniques to optimize task-specific control policies. Despite having emerged as a promising approach for complex problems, RL is still hard to use reliably for real-world applications. Apart…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-02-25 Siddhant Gangapurwala , Alexander Mitchell , Ioannis Havoutis

Multi-task representation learning (MTRL) is an approach that learns shared latent representations across related tasks, facilitating collaborative learning that improves the overall learning efficiency. This paper studies MTRL for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-07 Yaoze Guo , Shana Moothedath

A chatbot that converses like a human should be goal-oriented (i.e., be purposeful in conversation), which is beyond language generation. However, existing dialogue systems often heavily rely on cumbersome hand-crafted rules or costly…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-05-27 Jianfeng Liu , Feiyang Pan , Ling Luo

Offline policy learning is aimed at learning decision-making policies using existing datasets of trajectories without collecting additional data. The primary motivation for using reinforcement learning (RL) instead of supervised learning…

We present GR-RL, a robotic learning framework that turns a generalist vision-language-action (VLA) policy into a highly capable specialist for long-horizon dexterous manipulation. Assuming the optimality of human demonstrations is core to…

Developing agents that can execute multiple skills by learning from pre-collected datasets is an important problem in robotics, where online interaction with the environment is extremely time-consuming. Moreover, manually designing reward…

In reinforcement learning (RL), it is easier to solve a task if given a good representation. While deep RL should automatically acquire such good representations, prior work often finds that learning representations in an end-to-end fashion…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-21 Benjamin Eysenbach , Tianjun Zhang , Ruslan Salakhutdinov , Sergey Levine

In this study, we address the challenge of learning generalizable policies for compositional tasks defined by logical specifications. These tasks consist of multiple temporally extended sub-tasks. Due to the sub-task inter-dependencies and…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-11-05 Duo Xu , Faramarz Fekri

Goal representation affects the performance of Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning (HRL) algorithms by decomposing the complex learning problem into easier subtasks. Recent studies show that representations that preserve temporally abstract…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-24 Mehdi Zadem , Sergio Mover , Sao Mai Nguyen

Goal-conditioned hierarchical reinforcement learning (GCHRL) decomposes long-horizon tasks into sub-tasks through a hierarchical framework and it has demonstrated promising results across a variety of domains. However, the high-level…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-18 Fei Cui , Jiaojiao Fang , Mengke Yang , Guizhong Liu

At the core of reinforcement learning is the idea of learning beyond the performance in the data. However, scaling such systems has proven notoriously tricky. In contrast, techniques from generative modeling have proven remarkably scalable…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-30 Kevin Frans , Seohong Park , Pieter Abbeel , Sergey Levine

Model-free reinforcement learning algorithms have exhibited great potential in solving single-task sequential decision-making problems with high-dimensional observations and long horizons, but are known to be hard to generalize across…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-30 Boyuan Chen , Chuning Zhu , Pulkit Agrawal , Kaiqing Zhang , Abhishek Gupta

Recent advances in behavior cloning (BC) have enabled impressive visuomotor control policies. However, these approaches are limited by the quality of human demonstrations, the manual effort required for data collection, and the diminishing…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-09-29 Lars Ankile , Zhenyu Jiang , Rocky Duan , Guanya Shi , Pieter Abbeel , Anusha Nagabandi

Common approaches to Reinforcement Learning (RL) are seriously challenged by large-scale applications involving huge state spaces and sparse delayed reward feedback. Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning (HRL) methods attempt to address this…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2019-04-15 Jacob Rafati , David C. Noelle

Reinforcement learning faces significant challenges when applied to tasks characterized by sparse reward structures. Although imitation learning, within the domain of supervised learning, offers faster convergence, it relies heavily on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-04 Zeqiang Zhang , Fabian Wurzberger , Gerrit Schmid , Sebastian Gottwald , Daniel A. Braun

Goal-conditioned reinforcement learning (RL) concerns the problem of training an agent to maximize the probability of reaching target goal states. This paper presents an analysis of the goal-conditioned setting based on optimal control. In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Nathan P. Lawrence , Ali Mesbah

Learning visuomotor policies for agile quadrotor flight presents significant difficulties, primarily from inefficient policy exploration caused by high-dimensional visual inputs and the need for precise and low-latency control. To address…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-11-13 Jiaxu Xing , Angel Romero , Leonard Bauersfeld , Davide Scaramuzza

Learning to reach goal states and learning diverse skills through mutual information (MI) maximization have been proposed as principled frameworks for self-supervised reinforcement learning, allowing agents to acquire broadly applicable…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-04 Jongwook Choi , Archit Sharma , Honglak Lee , Sergey Levine , Shixiang Shane Gu

Reinforcement learning (RL) provides a theoretical framework for continuously improving an agent's behavior via trial and error. However, efficiently learning policies from scratch can be very difficult, particularly for tasks with…