English
Related papers

Related papers: Off-Policy Reward Shaping with Ensembles

200 papers

State-of-the-art model-based reinforcement learning methods train policies on imagined rollouts. These rollouts are trajectories generated by a learned dynamics model and are scored by a learned reward model, but without querying the true…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Nadav Timor , Ravid Shwartz-Ziv , Micah Goldblum , Yann LeCun , David Harel

Policy-based reinforcement learning methods suffer from the policy collapse problem. We find valued-based reinforcement learning methods with {\epsilon}-greedy mechanism are capable of enjoying three characteristics, Closed-form Diversity,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-03 Changnan Xiao , Haosen Shi , Jiajun Fan , Shihong Deng

A reinforcement learning agent that needs to pursue different goals across episodes requires a goal-conditional policy. In addition to their potential to generalize desirable behavior to unseen goals, such policies may also enable…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-02-21 Paulo Rauber , Avinash Ummadisingu , Filipe Mutz , Juergen Schmidhuber

Improving sample efficiency is central to Reinforcement Learning (RL), especially in environments where the rewards are sparse. Some recent approaches have proposed to specify reward functions as manually designed or learned reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-26 Shuai Han , Mehdi Dastani , Shihan Wang

Preference-based Reinforcement Learning (PbRL) enables policy learning through simple queries comparing trajectories from a single policy. While human responses to these queries make it possible to learn policies aligned with human…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-01-22 Yuki Kadokawa , Jonas Frey , Takahiro Miki , Takamitsu Matsubara , Marco Hutter

Reinforcement Learning (RL) suffers from sample inefficiency in sparse reward domains, and the problem is further pronounced in case of stochastic transitions. To improve the sample efficiency, reward shaping is a well-studied approach to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-10 Siddhant Bhambri , Amrita Bhattacharjee , Durgesh Kalwar , Lin Guan , Huan Liu , Subbarao Kambhampati

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a powerful machine learning technique that enables an intelligent agent to learn an optimal policy that maximizes the cumulative rewards in sequential decision making. Most of methods in the existing…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-01-06 Chengchun Shi , Zhengling Qi , Jianing Wang , Fan Zhou

Conveying complex objectives to reinforcement learning (RL) agents can often be difficult, involving meticulous design of reward functions that are sufficiently informative yet easy enough to provide. Human-in-the-loop RL methods allow…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-10 Kimin Lee , Laura Smith , Pieter Abbeel

For reinforcement learning on complex stochastic systems where many factors dynamically impact the output trajectories, it is desirable to effectively leverage the information from historical samples collected in previous iterations to…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-09-13 Hua Zheng , Wei Xie , M. Ben Feng

The beneficial effects of treatments vary across individuals in most studies. Treatment heterogeneity motivates practitioners to search for the optimal policy based on personal characteristics. A long-standing common practice in policy…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-01-06 Xuqiao Li , Ying Yan

Oftentimes, environments for sequential decision-making problems can be quite sparse in the provision of evaluative feedback to guide reinforcement-learning agents. In the extreme case, long trajectories of behavior are merely punctuated…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-22 Akash Velu , Skanda Vaidyanath , Dilip Arumugam

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…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-10-03 Xiefeng Wu

The goal of offline reinforcement learning is to learn a policy from a fixed dataset, without further interactions with the environment. This setting will be an increasingly more important paradigm for real-world applications of…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-11-17 Wenxuan Zhou , Sujay Bajracharya , David Held

In this paper, we address the issue of fairness in preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL) in the presence of multiple objectives. The main objective is to design control policies that can optimize multiple objectives while treating…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-04 Umer Siddique , Abhinav Sinha , Yongcan Cao

We consider a settings of hierarchical reinforcement learning, in which the reward is a sum of components. For each component we are given a policy that maximizes it and our goal is to assemble a policy from the individual policies that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-06 Tom Zahavy , Avinatan Hasidim , Haim Kaplan , Yishay Mansour

In this paper, we study offline preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL), where learning is based on pre-collected preference feedback over pairs of trajectories. While offline PbRL has demonstrated remarkable empirical success,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-04 Hyungkyu Kang , Min-hwan Oh

Off-policy deep reinforcement learning (RL) has been successful in a range of challenging domains. However, standard off-policy RL algorithms can suffer from several issues, such as instability in Q-learning and balancing exploration and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-15 Kimin Lee , Michael Laskin , Aravind Srinivas , Pieter Abbeel

Learning high-performance control policies that remain consistent with expert behavior is a fundamental challenge in robotics. Reinforcement learning can discover high-performing strategies but often departs from desirable human behavior,…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-04-06 Siwei Ju , Jan Tauberschmidt , Oleg Arenz , Peter van Vliet , Jan Peters

Preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL) is a suitable approach for style adaptation of pre-trained robotic behavior: adapting the robot's policy to follow human user preferences while still being able to perform the original task.…

Offline preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL) mitigates the need for reward definition, aligning with human preferences via preference-driven reward feedback without interacting with the environment. However, trajectory-wise…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-25 Teng Pang , Bingzheng Wang , Guoqiang Wu , Yilong Yin