Related papers: Potential-Based Shaping and Q-Value Initialization…
Potential-based reward shaping is commonly used to incorporate prior knowledge of how to solve the task into reinforcement learning because it can formally guarantee policy invariance. As such, the optimal policy and the ordering of…
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…
Reinforcement learning, which acquires a policy maximizing long-term rewards, has been actively studied. Unfortunately, this learning type is too slow and difficult to use in practical situations because the state-action space becomes huge…
Reward shaping is an effective technique for incorporating domain knowledge into reinforcement learning (RL). Existing approaches such as potential-based reward shaping normally make full use of a given shaping reward function. However,…
Learning to solve sparse-reward reinforcement learning problems is difficult, due to the lack of guidance towards the goal. But in some problems, prior knowledge can be used to augment the learning process. Reward shaping is a way to…
Providing reinforcement learning agents with informationally rich human knowledge can dramatically improve various aspects of learning. Prior work has developed different kinds of shaping methods that enable agents to learn efficiently in…
Reinforcement learning provides an automated framework for learning behaviors from high-level reward specifications, but in practice the choice of reward function can be crucial for good results -- while in principle the reward only needs…
In reinforcement learning, different reward functions can be equivalent in terms of the optimal policies they induce. A particularly well-known and important example is potential shaping, a class of functions that can be added to any reward…
In continuing tasks, average-reward reinforcement learning may be a more appropriate problem formulation than the more common discounted reward formulation. As usual, learning an optimal policy in this setting typically requires a large…
Reinforcement learning involves agents interacting with an environment to complete tasks. When rewards provided by the environment are sparse, agents may not receive immediate feedback on the quality of actions that they take, thereby…
The main challenge in developing effective reinforcement learning (RL) pipelines is often the design and tuning the reward functions. Well-designed shaping reward can lead to significantly faster learning. Naively formulated rewards,…
This paper introduces an approach to Reinforcement Learning Algorithm by comparing their immediate rewards using a variation of Q-Learning algorithm. Unlike the conventional Q-Learning, the proposed algorithm compares current reward with…
Potential-based reward shaping (PBRS) is a particular category of machine learning methods which aims to improve the learning speed of a reinforcement learning agent by extracting and utilizing extra knowledge while performing a task. There…
Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) is computationally challenging, with common approaches requiring the solution of multiple reinforcement learning (RL) sub-problems. This work motivates the use of potential-based reward shaping to reduce…
Reward shaping is one of the most effective methods to tackle the crucial yet challenging problem of credit assignment in Reinforcement Learning (RL). However, designing shaping functions usually requires much expert knowledge and…
This paper augments the reward received by a reinforcement learning agent with potential functions in order to help the agent learn (possibly stochastic) optimal policies. We show that a potential-based reward shaping scheme is able to…
We investigate the effect of reward shaping in improving the performance of reinforcement learning in the context of the real-time strategy, capture-the-flag game. The game is characterized by sparse rewards that are associated with…
The aim of Reinforcement Learning (RL) in real-world applications is to create systems capable of making autonomous decisions by learning from their environment through trial and error. This paper emphasizes the importance of reward…
Reward shaping (RS) is a powerful method in reinforcement learning (RL) for overcoming the problem of sparse or uninformative rewards. However, RS typically relies on manually engineered shaping-reward functions whose construction is…
Potential-based reward shaping provides an approach for designing good reward functions, with the purpose of speeding up learning. However, automatically finding potential functions for complex environments is a difficult problem (in fact,…