English
Related papers

Related papers: Focused Skill Discovery: Learning to Control Speci…

200 papers

Reinforcement learning (RL) has made significant progress in various domains, but scaling it to long-horizon tasks with complex decision-making remains challenging. Skill learning attempts to address this by abstracting actions into…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-22 Jinwoo Choi , Seung-Woo Seo

Representation learning algorithms are designed to learn abstract features that characterize data. State representation learning (SRL) focuses on a particular kind of representation learning where learned features are in low dimension,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-10-30 Timothée Lesort , Natalia Díaz-Rodríguez , Jean-François Goudou , David Filliat

Controllable Markov chains describe the dynamics of sequential decision making tasks and are the central component in optimal control and reinforcement learning. In this work, we give the general form of an optimal policy for learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-24 Peter N. Loxley

One explanation for how people can plan efficiently despite limited cognitive resources is that we possess a set of adaptive planning strategies and know when and how to use them. But how are these strategies acquired? While previous…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-12-05 Ruiqi He , Falk Lieder

Optimal control and sequential decision making are widely used in many complex tasks. Optimal control over a sequence of natural images is a first step towards understanding the role of vision in control. Here, we formalize this problem as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-07 Peter N. Loxley

We study sim-to-real skill transfer and discovery in the context of robotics control using representation learning. We draw inspiration from spectral decomposition of Markov decision processes. The spectral decomposition brings about…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-09 Haitong Ma , Zhaolin Ren , Bo Dai , Na Li

Deep Reinforcement Learning has shown significant progress in extracting useful representations from high-dimensional inputs albeit using hand-crafted auxiliary tasks and pseudo rewards. Automatically learning such representations in an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-28 Somjit Nath , Gopeshh Raaj Subbaraj , Khimya Khetarpal , Samira Ebrahimi Kahou

Skills play a central role in the job market and many human resources (HR) processes. In the wake of other digital experiences, today's online job market has candidates expecting to see the right opportunities based on their skill set.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-09-14 Jens-Joris Decorte , Jeroen Van Hautte , Johannes Deleu , Chris Develder , Thomas Demeester

A generalist robot must be able to complete a variety of tasks in its environment. One appealing way to specify each task is in terms of a goal observation. However, learning goal-reaching policies with reinforcement learning remains a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-01 Stephen Tian , Suraj Nair , Frederik Ebert , Sudeep Dasari , Benjamin Eysenbach , Chelsea Finn , Sergey Levine

We consider the problem of reinforcement learning under safety requirements, in which an agent is trained to complete a given task, typically formalized as the maximization of a reward signal over time, while concurrently avoiding…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-09-25 Tu-Hoa Pham , Giovanni De Magistris , Don Joven Agravante , Subhajit Chaudhury , Asim Munawar , Ryuki Tachibana

Humans often think of complex tasks as combinations of simpler subtasks in order to learn those complex tasks more efficiently. For example, a backflip could be considered a combination of four subskills: jumping, tucking knees, rolling…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-21 Pranay Pasula

We study the problem of learning exploration-exploitation strategies that effectively adapt to dynamic environments, where the task may change over time. While RNN-based policies could in principle represent such strategies, in practice…

Deep reinforcement learning algorithms can learn complex behavioral skills, but real-world application of these methods requires a large amount of experience to be collected by the agent. In practical settings, such as robotics, this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-11-21 Benjamin Eysenbach , Shixiang Gu , Julian Ibarz , Sergey Levine

Hierarchical reinforcement learning is a promising approach to tackle long-horizon decision-making problems with sparse rewards. Unfortunately, most methods still decouple the lower-level skill acquisition process and the training of a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-05-15 Alexander C. Li , Carlos Florensa , Ignasi Clavera , Pieter Abbeel

Learning to evaluate and improve policies is a core problem of Reinforcement Learning (RL). Traditional RL algorithms learn a value function defined for a single policy. A recently explored competitive alternative is to learn a single value…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-05 Francesco Faccio , Aditya Ramesh , Vincent Herrmann , Jean Harb , Jürgen Schmidhuber

Policy gradient methods hold great potential for solving complex continuous control tasks. Still, their training efficiency can be improved by exploiting structure within the optimization problem. Recent work indicates that supervised…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-19 Jan Schneider , Pierre Schumacher , Simon Guist , Le Chen , Daniel Häufle , Bernhard Schölkopf , Dieter Büchler

While Reinforcement Learning can achieve impressive results for complex tasks, the learned policies are generally prone to fail in downstream tasks with even minor model mismatch or unexpected perturbations. Recent works have demonstrated…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-23 Kang Xu , Yan Ma , Bingsheng Wei , Wei Li

In reinforcement learning, we typically refer to unsupervised pre-training when we aim to pre-train a policy without a priori access to the task specification, i.e. rewards, to be later employed for efficient learning of downstream tasks.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Riccardo Zamboni , Mirco Mutti , Marcello Restelli

All physical laws are described as relationships between state variables that give a complete and non-redundant description of the relevant system dynamics. However, despite the prevalence of computing power and AI, the process of…

Dynamical Systems · Mathematics 2021-12-21 Boyuan Chen , Kuang Huang , Sunand Raghupathi , Ishaan Chandratreya , Qiang Du , Hod Lipson

Understanding physical phenomena is a key competence that enables humans and animals to act and interact under uncertain perception in previously unseen environments containing novel objects and their configurations. In this work, we…

Robotics · Computer Science 2019-04-23 Wenbin Li , Aleš Leonardis , Jeannette Bohg , Mario Fritz