A locally-built, LLM-digested index of recent arXiv papers in quant finance, geometry/topology, and statistical ML — keyword search served straight from SQLite on this machine.
A new EM framework for goal-conditioned RL improves performance on sparse reward tasks.
A novel approach learns goal-conditioned policies for locomotion using batch RL.
A novel framework uses goal-conditioned reinforcement learning to generate diverse samples.
Generative neural nets learn deep policies conditioned on goals.
This work tackles long-term visual planning by goal-conditioned hierarchical predictors.
New method tackles parcel routing with AI.
This work considers two distinct settings: imitation learning and goal-conditioned reinforcement learning. In either case, effective solutions require the agent to reliably reach a specified state (a goal), or set of states (a demonstration). Drawing a connection between probabilistic long-term dynamics and the desired…
Physics-informed GCRL tackles sparse feedback learning with hybrid dynamics.
Goal-conditioned policies are used in order to break down complex reinforcement learning (RL) problems by using subgoals, which can be defined either in state space or in a latent feature space. This can increase the efficiency of learning by using a curriculum, and also enables simultaneous learning and generalization…
Eikonal-Constrained QRL improves goal-reaching in reinforcement learning.
We propose a novel framework for multi-task reinforcement learning (MTRL). Using a variational inference formulation, we learn policies that generalize across both changing dynamics and goals. The resulting policies are parametrized by shared parameters that allow for transfer between different dynamics and goal condit…
The paper introduces an adjacency constraint to improve goal-conditioned HRL.
Pre-trained language model boosts RL efficiency.
Causal reasoning has been an indispensable capability for humans and other intelligent animals to interact with the physical world. In this work, we propose to endow an artificial agent with the capability of causal reasoning for completing goal-directed tasks. We develop learning-based approaches to inducing causal kn…
Efficient exploration is necessary to achieve good sample efficiency for reinforcement learning in general. From small, tabular settings such as gridworlds to large, continuous and sparse reward settings such as robotic object manipulation tasks, exploration through adding an uncertainty bonus to the reward function ha…
DAGR improves navigation by refining goal representations conditioned on the current state.
Sparse reward problems are one of the biggest challenges in Reinforcement Learning. Goal-directed tasks are one such sparse reward problems where a reward signal is received only when the goal is reached. One promising way to train an agent to perform goal-directed tasks is to use Hindsight Learning approaches. In thes…
Planning methods can solve temporally extended sequential decision making problems by composing simple behaviors. However, planning requires suitable abstractions for the states and transitions, which typically need to be designed by hand. In contrast, model-free reinforcement learning (RL) can acquire behaviors from l…
KEMP predicts long-term trajectories for autonomous driving using keyframes.
We present relay policy learning, a method for imitation and reinforcement learning that can solve multi-stage, long-horizon robotic tasks. This general and universally-applicable, two-phase approach consists of an imitation learning stage that produces goal-conditioned hierarchical policies, and a reinforcement learni…
In this paper we consider self-supervised representation learning to improve sample efficiency in reinforcement learning (RL). We propose a forward prediction objective for simultaneously learning embeddings of states and action sequences. These embeddings capture the structure of the environment's dynamics, enabling e…
Improved exploration algorithm for unknown MDPs with reduced sample complexity.
This study analyzes convergence and stability of reinforcement learning algorithms.
Learning to control an environment without hand-crafted rewards or expert data remains challenging and is at the frontier of reinforcement learning research. We present an unsupervised learning algorithm to train agents to achieve perceptually-specified goals using only a stream of observations and actions. Our agent s…
Plan2Vec learns image representations without labels, improving control tasks.
We present HiDe, a novel hierarchical reinforcement learning architecture that successfully solves long horizon control tasks and generalizes to unseen test scenarios. Functional decomposition between planning and low-level control is achieved by explicitly separating the state-action spaces across the hierarchy, which…
A central challenge in reinforcement learning is discovering effective policies for tasks where rewards are sparsely distributed. We postulate that in the absence of useful reward signals, an effective exploration strategy should seek out {\it decision states}. These states lie at critical junctions in the state space …
Paper analyzes neural network complexity for planning problems.
In Multi-Goal Reinforcement Learning, an agent learns to achieve multiple goals with a goal-conditioned policy. During learning, the agent first collects the trajectories into a replay buffer, and later these trajectories are selected randomly for replay. However, the achieved goals in the replay buffer are often biase…
In many real-world scenarios, an autonomous agent often encounters various tasks within a single complex environment. We propose to build a graph abstraction over the environment structure to accelerate the learning of these tasks. Here, nodes are important points of interest (pivotal states) and edges represent feasib…
What is a good exploration strategy for an agent that interacts with an environment in the absence of external rewards? Ideally, we would like to get a policy driving towards a uniform state-action visitation (highly exploring) in a minimum number of steps (fast mixing), in order to ease efficient learning of any goal-…
ESPD improves learning efficiency in sparse reward reinforcement learning.
AMIGo uses adversarial intrinsic goals to teach RL agents new skills.
This paper proposes a new method to connect language and physical actions in reinforcement learning.
For an autonomous agent to fulfill a wide range of user-specified goals at test time, it must be able to learn broadly applicable and general-purpose skill repertoires. Furthermore, to provide the requisite level of generality, these skills must handle raw sensory input such as images. In this paper, we propose an algo…
Autonomous reinforcement learning agents, like children, do not have access to predefined goals and reward functions. They must discover potential goals, learn their own reward functions and engage in their own learning trajectory. Children, however, benefit from exposure to language, helping to organize and mediate th…
CoDA augments data with counterfactuals from local causal structures.
We study a generalized setup for learning from demonstration to build an agent that can manipulate novel objects in unseen scenarios by looking at only a single video of human demonstration from a third-person perspective. To accomplish this goal, our agent should not only learn to understand the intent of the demonstr…
Generically learns movement control policies from exploration data.
Conventionally, model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) aims to learn a global model for the dynamics of the environment. A good model can potentially enable planning algorithms to generate a large variety of behaviors and solve diverse tasks. However, learning an accurate model for complex dynamical systems is diffi…
The current dominant paradigm for imitation learning relies on strong supervision of expert actions to learn both 'what' and 'how' to imitate. We pursue an alternative paradigm wherein an agent first explores the world without any expert supervision and then distills its experience into a goal-conditioned skill policy …
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 detecting whether the desired configuration is reached might require considerable sup…
Representation learning is a central challenge across a range of machine learning areas. In reinforcement learning, effective and functional representations have the potential to tremendously accelerate learning progress and solve more challenging problems. Most prior work on representation learning has focused on gene…
Hierarchies of temporally decoupled policies present a promising approach for enabling structured exploration in complex long-term planning problems. To fully achieve this approach an end-to-end training paradigm is needed. However, training these multi-level policies has had limited success due to challenges arising f…
Reinforcement learning algorithms use correlations between policies and rewards to improve agent performance. But in dynamic or sparsely rewarding environments these correlations are often too small, or rewarding events are too infrequent to make learning feasible. Human education instead relies on curricula--the break…
Success conditioning optimizes policies by imitating successful trajectories, solving a trust-region optimization problem.
A major challenge in reinforcement learning is exploration, when local dithering methods such as epsilon-greedy sampling are insufficient to solve a given task. Many recent methods have proposed to intrinsically motivate an agent to seek novel states, driving the agent to discover improved reward. However, while state-…
Consider mutli-goal tasks that involve static environments and dynamic goals. Examples of such tasks, such as goal-directed navigation and pick-and-place in robotics, abound. Two types of Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms are used for such tasks: model-free or model-based. Each of these approaches has limitations.…