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In Reinforcement Learning (abbreviated as RL), an agent interacts with the environment via a set of possible actions, and a reward is generated from some unknown distribution. The task here is to find an optimal set of actions such that the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-21 Aditi Anand , Suman Banerjee , Dildar Ali

With reinforcement learning, an agent could learn complex behaviors from high-level abstractions of the task. However, exploration and reward shaping remained challenging for existing methods, especially in scenarios where the extrinsic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-11 Jie Chen , Wenjun Xu

Conversational Recommender Systems (CRS) actively elicit user preferences to generate adaptive recommendations. Mainstream reinforcement learning-based CRS solutions heavily rely on handcrafted reward functions, which may not be aligned…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2023-11-01 Zhendong Chu , Nan Wang , Hongning Wang

To convey desired behavior to a Reinforcement Learning (RL) agent, a designer must choose a reward function for the environment, arguably the most important knob designers have in interacting with RL agents. Although many reward functions…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-01 Henry Sowerby , Zhiyuan Zhou , Michael L. Littman

Reinforcement Learning has emerged as a strong alternative to solve optimization tasks efficiently. The use of these algorithms highly depends on the feedback signals provided by the environment in charge of informing about how good (or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-01 Alain Andres , Esther Villar-Rodriguez , Javier Del Ser

The reinforcement learning research area contains a wide range of methods for solving the problems of intelligent agent control. Despite the progress that has been made, the task of creating a highly autonomous agent is still a significant…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-25 Artem Latyshev , Aleksandr I. Panov

Designing optimal reward functions has been desired but extremely difficult in reinforcement learning (RL). When it comes to modern complex tasks, sophisticated reward functions are widely used to simplify policy learning yet even a tiny…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-07 Ning Wei , Jiahua Liang , Di Xie , Shiliang Pu

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a central problem in artificial intelligence. This problem consists of defining artificial agents that can learn optimal behaviour by interacting with an environment -- where the optimal behaviour is defined…

We study reward design strategies for incentivizing a reinforcement learning agent to adopt a policy from a set of admissible policies. The goal of the reward designer is to modify the underlying reward function cost-efficiently while…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-07 Kiarash Banihashem , Adish Singla , Jiarui Gan , Goran Radanovic

In this paper we propose a novel gradient algorithm to learn a policy from an expert's observed behavior assuming that the expert behaves optimally with respect to some unknown reward function of a Markovian Decision Problem. The…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-06-26 Gergely Neu , Csaba Szepesvari

In this paper, we study an inverse reinforcement learning problem that involves learning the reward function of a learning agent using trajectory data collected while this agent is learning its optimal policy. To address this problem, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-21 Kavinayan P. Sivakumar , Yi Shen , Zachary Bell , Scott Nivison , Boyuan Chen , Michael M. Zavlanos

Reinforcement learning has enabled agents to solve challenging tasks in unknown environments. However, manually crafting reward functions can be time consuming, expensive, and error prone to human error. Competing objectives have been…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-11 Brendon Matusch , Jimmy Ba , Danijar Hafner

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-07-23 Baicen Xiao , Bhaskar Ramasubramanian , Andrew Clark , Hannaneh Hajishirzi , Linda Bushnell , Radha Poovendran

Extrinsic rewards can effectively guide reinforcement learning (RL) agents in specific tasks. However, extrinsic rewards frequently fall short in complex environments due to the significant human effort needed for their design and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-28 Mingqi Yuan , Roger Creus Castanyer , Bo Li , Xin Jin , Wenjun Zeng , Glen Berseth

Reinforcement learning is commonly concerned with problems of maximizing accumulated rewards in Markov decision processes. Oftentimes, a certain goal state or a subset of the state space attain maximal reward. In such a case, the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-08-23 Pavel Osinenko , Grigory Yaremenko , Georgiy Malaniya , Anton Bolychev , Alexander Gepperth

Large language model (LLM) agents learn by interacting with environments, but long-horizon training remains fundamentally bottlenecked by sparse and delayed rewards. Existing methods typically address this challenge through post-hoc credit…

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,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-06 Yujing Hu , Weixun Wang , Hangtian Jia , Yixiang Wang , Yingfeng Chen , Jianye Hao , Feng Wu , Changjie Fan

Automatically synthesizing dense rewards from natural language descriptions is a promising paradigm in reinforcement learning (RL), with applications to sparse reward problems, open-ended exploration, and hierarchical skill design. Recent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-27 Qinqing Zheng , Mikael Henaff , Amy Zhang , Aditya Grover , Brandon Amos

We introduce an exploration bonus for deep reinforcement learning methods calculated using self-organising feature maps. Our method uses adaptive resonance theory (ART) providing online, unsupervised clustering to quantify the novelty of a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-09 Marius Lindegaard , Hjalmar Jacob Vinje , Odin Aleksander Severinsen

This paper introduces a novel method of adding intrinsic bonuses to task-oriented reward function in order to efficiently facilitate reinforcement learning search. While various bonuses have been designed to date, they are analogous to the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-04 Taisuke Kobayashi