Related papers: Maximum-Entropy Exploration with Future State-Acti…
Many real-world human behaviors can be characterized as a sequential decision making processes, such as urban travelers choices of transport modes and routes (Wu et al. 2017). Differing from choices controlled by machines, which in general…
We provide new perspectives and inference algorithms for Maximum Entropy (MaxEnt) Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL), which provides a principled method to find a most non-committal reward function consistent with given expert…
"Intrinsic motivation" refers to the capacity for intelligent systems to be motivated endogenously, i.e. by features of agential architecture itself rather than by learned associations between action and reward. This paper views active…
Intrinsic motivation and reward shaping guide reinforcement learning (RL) agents by adding pseudo-rewards, which can lead to useful emergent behaviors. However, they can also encourage counterproductive exploits, e.g., fixation with noisy…
Exploration is essential for reinforcement learning (RL). To face the challenges of exploration, we consider a reward-free RL framework that completely separates exploration from exploitation and brings new challenges for exploration…
An agent choosing between various actions tends to take the one with the lowest cost. But this choice is arguably too rigid (not adaptive) to be useful in complex situations, e.g., where exploration-exploitation trade-off is relevant in…
Tasks with large state space and sparse rewards present a longstanding challenge to reinforcement learning. In these tasks, an agent needs to explore the state space efficiently until it finds a reward. To deal with this problem, the…
Reinforcement learning (RL) is one of the three basic paradigms of machine learning. It has demonstrated impressive performance in many complex tasks like Go and StarCraft, which is increasingly involved in smart manufacturing and…
Simplicity is a critical inductive bias for designing data-driven controllers, especially when robustness is important. Despite the impressive results of deep reinforcement learning in complex control tasks, it is prone to capturing…
Reinforcement learning has enabled agents to solve challenging tasks in unknown environments. However, manually crafting reward functions can be time consuming, expensive, and error prone to human error. Competing objectives have been…
Reinforcement Learning algorithms are primarily focused on learning a policy that maximizes expected return. As a result, the learned policy can exploit one or few reward sources. However, in many natural situations, it is desirable to…
Exploration is an extremely challenging problem in reinforcement learning, especially in high dimensional state and action spaces and when only sparse rewards are available. Effective representations can indicate which components of the…
Learning about many things can provide numerous benefits to a reinforcement learning system. For example, learning many auxiliary value functions, in addition to optimizing the environmental reward, appears to improve both exploration and…
How do you incentivize self-interested agents to $\textit{explore}$ when they prefer to $\textit{exploit}$? We consider complex exploration problems, where each agent faces the same (but unknown) MDP. In contrast with traditional…
Stemming on the idea that a key objective in reinforcement learning is to invert a target distribution of effects, end-effect drives are proposed as an effective way to implement goal-directed motor learning, in the absence of an explicit…
In recent years, deep reinforcement learning has been shown to be adept at solving sequential decision processes with high-dimensional state spaces such as in the Atari games. Many reinforcement learning problems, however, involve…
The objective of a reinforcement learning agent is to discover better actions through exploration. However, typical exploration techniques aim to maximize rewards, often incurring high costs in both exploration and learning processes. We…
One of the main challenges in reinforcement learning is solving tasks with sparse reward. We show that the difficulty of discovering a distant rewarding state in an MDP is bounded by the expected cover time of a random walk over the graph…
Information gathering in a partially observable environment can be formulated as a reinforcement learning (RL), problem where the reward depends on the agent's uncertainty. For example, the reward can be the negative entropy of the agent's…
Reward design is a critical part of the application of reinforcement learning, the performance of which strongly depends on how well the reward signal frames the goal of the designer and how well the signal assesses progress in reaching…