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Related papers: Off-Policy Reward Shaping with Ensembles

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Preference-based Reinforcement Learning (PbRL) replaces reward values in traditional reinforcement learning by preferences to better elicit human opinion on the target objective, especially when numerical reward values are hard to design or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-27 Yichong Xu , Ruosong Wang , Lin F. Yang , Aarti Singh , Artur Dubrawski

Multi-objective reinforcement learning (MORL) is a structured approach for optimizing tasks with multiple objectives. However, it often relies on pre-defined reward functions, which can be hard to design for balancing conflicting goals and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-21 Ni Mu , Yao Luan , Qing-Shan Jia

Designing effective reward functions remains a central challenge in reinforcement learning, especially in multi-objective environments. In this work, we propose Multi-Objective Reward Shaping with Exploration (MORSE), a general framework…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-18 Yuqing Xie , Jiayu Chen , Wenhao Tang , Ya Zhang , Chao Yu , Yu Wang

Reinforcement learning has shown promise in learning policies that can solve complex problems. However, manually specifying a good reward function can be difficult, especially for intricate tasks. Inverse reinforcement learning offers a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-11-28 Peter Henderson , Wei-Di Chang , Pierre-Luc Bacon , David Meger , Joelle Pineau , Doina Precup

The ability to exploit prior experience to solve novel problems rapidly is a hallmark of biological learning systems and of great practical importance for artificial ones. In the meta reinforcement learning literature much recent work has…

One of the central challenges faced by a reinforcement learning (RL) agent is to effectively learn a (near-)optimal policy in environments with large state spaces having sparse and noisy feedback signals. In real-world applications, an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-24 Parameswaran Kamalaruban , Rati Devidze , Volkan Cevher , Adish Singla

Offline reinforcement learning has become one of the most practical RL settings. However, most existing works on offline RL focus on the standard setting with scalar reward feedback. It remains unknown how to universally transfer the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-25 Yinglun Xu , David Zhu , Rohan Gumaste , Gagandeep Singh

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…

Offline reinforcement learning enables agents to leverage large pre-collected datasets of environment transitions to learn control policies, circumventing the need for potentially expensive or unsafe online data collection. Significant…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-17 Cong Lu , Philip J. Ball , Jack Parker-Holder , Michael A. Osborne , Stephen J. Roberts

Evolution Strategy (ES) is a powerful black-box optimization technique based on the idea of natural evolution. In each of its iterations, a key step entails ranking candidate solutions based on some fitness score. For an ES method in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-22 Eshwar S R , Shishir Kolathaya , Gugan Thoppe

Reinforcement learning (RL) faces challenges in evaluating policy trajectories within intricate game tasks due to the difficulty in designing comprehensive and precise reward functions. This inherent difficulty curtails the broader…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-07-02 Zichao Shen , Tianchen Zhu , Qingyun Sun , Shiqi Gao , Jianxin Li

We consider a problem of learning the reward and policy from expert examples under unknown dynamics. Our proposed method builds on the framework of generative adversarial networks and introduces the empowerment-regularized maximum-entropy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-02-26 Ahmed H. Qureshi , Byron Boots , Michael C. Yip

Sparse rewards are a major bottleneck in multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), where simultaneous learning induces non-stationarity and makes reward design especially delicate. Reward shaping can accelerate learning, but in the…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2026-05-25 Elie Abboud , Oren Gal

We introduce Probabilistic Rank and Reward (PRR), a scalable probabilistic model for personalized slate recommendation. Our approach allows off-policy estimation of the reward in the scenario where the user interacts with at most one item…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2024-07-08 Imad Aouali , Achraf Ait Sidi Hammou , Otmane Sakhi , David Rohde , Flavian Vasile

When learning policies for real-world domains, two important questions arise: (i) how to efficiently use pre-collected off-policy, non-optimal behavior data; and (ii) how to mediate among different competing objectives and constraints. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-03-22 Hoang M. Le , Cameron Voloshin , Yisong Yue

While reinforcement learning algorithms provide automated acquisition of optimal policies, practical application of such methods requires a number of design decisions, such as manually designing reward functions that not only define the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-29 Tim G. J. Rudner , Vitchyr H. Pong , Rowan McAllister , Yarin Gal , Sergey Levine

To accumulate knowledge and improve its policy of behaviour, a reinforcement learning agent can learn `off-policy' about policies that differ from the policy used to generate its experience. This is important to learn counterfactuals, or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-03 Simon Schmitt , John Shawe-Taylor , Hado van Hasselt

In high-dimensional state spaces, the usefulness of Reinforcement Learning (RL) is limited by the problem of exploration. This issue has been addressed using potential-based reward shaping (PB-RS) previously. In the present work, we…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-07-15 Ingmar Schubert , Ozgur S. Oguz , Marc Toussaint

We propose a framework for transferring any existing policy from a potentially unknown source MDP to a target MDP. This framework (1) enables reuse in the target domain of any form of source policy, including classical controllers,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-01 Daniel Graves , Jun Jin , Jun Luo

Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) is attractive in scenarios where reward engineering can be tedious. However, prior IRL algorithms use on-policy transitions, which require intensive sampling from the current policy for stable and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-24 Hana Hoshino , Kei Ota , Asako Kanezaki , Rio Yokota