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From Reward Shaping to Q-Shaping: Achieving Unbiased Learning with LLM-Guided Knowledge

Artificial Intelligence 2024-10-03 v1 Machine Learning

Abstract

Q-shaping is an extension of Q-value initialization and serves as an alternative to reward shaping for incorporating domain knowledge to accelerate agent training, thereby improving sample efficiency by directly shaping Q-values. This approach is both general and robust across diverse tasks, allowing for immediate impact assessment while guaranteeing optimality. We evaluated Q-shaping across 20 different environments using a large language model (LLM) as the heuristic provider. The results demonstrate that Q-shaping significantly enhances sample efficiency, achieving a \textbf{16.87\%} improvement over the best baseline in each environment and a \textbf{253.80\%} improvement compared to LLM-based reward shaping methods. These findings establish Q-shaping as a superior and unbiased alternative to conventional reward shaping in reinforcement learning.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2410.01458,
  title  = {From Reward Shaping to Q-Shaping: Achieving Unbiased Learning with LLM-Guided Knowledge},
  author = {Xiefeng Wu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2410.01458},
  year   = {2024}
}

Comments

q-shaping, reinforcement learning, reward shaping