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Reinforcement learning (RL) relies heavily on exploration to learn from its environment and maximize observed rewards. Therefore, it is essential to design a reward function that guarantees optimal learning from the received experience.…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-06-20 Ingy ElSayed-Aly , Lu Feng

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

Meta reinforcement learning (Meta-RL) is an approach wherein the experience gained from solving a variety of tasks is distilled into a meta-policy. The meta-policy, when adapted over only a small (or just a single) number of steps, is able…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-28 Desik Rengarajan , Sapana Chaudhary , Jaewon Kim , Dileep Kalathil , Srinivas Shakkottai

Reinforcement learning (RL) agents often face challenges in balancing exploration and exploitation, particularly in environments where sparse or dense rewards bias learning. Biological systems, such as human toddlers, naturally navigate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-30 Junseok Park , Hyeonseo Yang , Min Whoo Lee , Won-Seok Choi , Minsu Lee , Byoung-Tak Zhang

We consider a setting for Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) where the learner is extended with the ability to actively select multiple environments, observing an agent's behavior on each environment. We first demonstrate that if the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2016-01-26 Kareem Amin , Satinder Singh

Designing rewards for Reinforcement Learning (RL) is challenging because it needs to convey the desired task, be efficient to optimize, and be easy to compute. The latter is particularly problematic when applying RL to robotics, where…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-05-28 Yiming Ding , Carlos Florensa , Mariano Phielipp , Pieter Abbeel

Reinforcement learning (RL) commonly relies on scalar rewards with limited ability to express temporal, conditional, or safety-critical goals, and can lead to reward hacking. Temporal logic expressible via the more general class of…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-11-26 Dominik Wagner , Leon Witzman , Luke Ong

Reinforcement learning (RL) has been successful in training agents in various learning environments, including video-games. However, such work modifies and shrinks the action space from the game's original. This is to avoid trying…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-05-27 Anssi Kanervisto , Christian Scheller , Ville Hautamäki

The market for domestic robots made to perform household chores is growing as these robots relieve people of everyday responsibilities. Domestic robots are generally welcomed for their role in easing human labor, in contrast to industrial…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-05-30 Arpita Soni , Sujatha Alla , Suresh Dodda , Hemanth Volikatla

The reinforcement learning (RL) research area is very active, with an important number of new contributions; especially considering the emergent field of deep RL (DRL). However a number of scientific and technical challenges still need to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-20 Arthur Aubret , Laetitia Matignon , Salima Hassas

Reinforcement Learning (RL), bolstered by the expressive capabilities of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) for function approximation, has demonstrated considerable success in numerous applications. However, its practicality in addressing various…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-26 Aditya Mohan , Amy Zhang , Marius Lindauer

Single-task RL agents are typically trained under a fixed reward function, which limits their robustness to reward misspecification and their ability to adapt to changing preferences. We introduce Reward-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Michal Nauman , Marek Cygan , Pieter Abbeel

Reinforcement learning (RL), particularly its combination with deep neural networks referred to as deep RL (DRL), has shown tremendous promise across a wide range of applications, suggesting its potential for enabling the development of…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-09-17 Chen Tang , Ben Abbatematteo , Jiaheng Hu , Rohan Chandra , Roberto Martín-Martín , Peter Stone

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) is a very active research area. However, several technical and scientific issues require to be addressed, amongst which we can mention data inefficiency, exploration-exploitation trade-off, and multi-task…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-24 Mohammad Reza Samsami , Hossein Alimadad

When robots enter everyday human environments, they need to understand their tasks and how they should perform those tasks. To encode these, reward functions, which specify the objective of a robot, are employed. However, designing reward…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-10-21 Erdem Bıyık

Deep Reinforcement Learning is a promising tool for robotic control, yet practical application is often hindered by the difficulty of designing effective reward functions. Real-world tasks typically require optimizing multiple objectives…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-06 Kilian Freitag , Knut Åkesson , Morteza Haghir Chehreghani

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

Much of the current work on reinforcement learning studies episodic settings, where the agent is reset between trials to an initial state distribution, often with well-shaped reward functions. Non-episodic settings, where the agent must…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-23 John D. Co-Reyes , Suvansh Sanjeev , Glen Berseth , Abhishek Gupta , Sergey Levine

While Reinforcement Learning (RL) aims to train an agent from a reward function in a given environment, Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) seeks to recover the reward function from observing an expert's behavior. It is well known that, in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-14 Paul Rolland , Luca Viano , Norman Schuerhoff , Boris Nikolov , Volkan Cevher

The goal of inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) is to infer a reward function that explains the behavior of an agent performing a task. The assumption that most approaches make is that the demonstrated behavior is near-optimal. In many…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-20 Luis Haug , Ivan Ovinnikov , Eugene Bykovets