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One of the challenges in applying reinforcement learning in a complex real-world environment lies in providing the agent with a sufficiently detailed reward function. Any misalignment between the reward and the desired behavior can result…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-24 Neta Glazer , Aviv Navon , Aviv Shamsian , Ethan Fetaya

In reinforcement learning (RL), different reward functions can define the same optimal policy but result in drastically different learning performance. For some, the agent gets stuck with a suboptimal behavior, and for others, it solves the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-25 Grigorii Veviurko , Wendelin Böhmer , Mathijs de Weerdt

Optimal designs are usually model-dependent and likely to be sub-optimal if the postulated model is not correctly specified. In practice, it is common that a researcher has a list of candidate models at hand and a design has to be found…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2023-03-29 Mingyao Ai , Holger Dette , Zhengfu Liu , Jun Yu

Designing reward functions for efficiently guiding reinforcement learning (RL) agents toward specific behaviors is a complex task. This is challenging since it requires the identification of reward structures that are not sparse and that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-01 Dhawal Gupta , Yash Chandak , Scott M. Jordan , Philip S. Thomas , Bruno Castro da Silva

Rewards play a crucial role in reinforcement learning. To arrive at the desired policy, the design of a suitable reward function often requires significant domain expertise as well as trial-and-error. Here, we aim to minimize the effort…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-11-18 Zheng Wu , Wenzhao Lian , Vaibhav Unhelkar , Masayoshi Tomizuka , Stefan Schaal

Designing a perfect reward function that depicts all the aspects of the intended behavior is almost impossible, especially generalizing it outside of the training environments. Active Inverse Reward Design (AIRD) proposed the use of a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-21 Panagiotis Liampas

Designing effective reward functions is critical for reinforcement learning-based biomechanical simulations, yet HCI researchers and practitioners often waste (computation) time with unintuitive trial-and-error tuning. This paper…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2025-08-22 Hannah Selder , Florian Fischer , Per Ola Kristensson , Arthur Fleig

Incentives are more likely to elicit desired outcomes when they are designed based on accurate models of agents' strategic behavior. A growing literature, however, suggests that people do not quite behave like standard economic agents in a…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2014-06-09 Arpita Ghosh , Robert Kleinberg

Solving tasks with sparse rewards is one of the most important challenges in reinforcement learning. In the single-agent setting, this challenge is addressed by introducing intrinsic rewards that motivate agents to explore unseen regions of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-25 Shariq Iqbal , Fei Sha

Exploration is a fundamental problem in robotics. While sampling-based planners have shown high performance, they are oftentimes compute intensive and can exhibit high variance. To this end, we propose to directly learn the underlying…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-07-15 Lukas Schmid , Chao Ni , Yuliang Zhong , Roland Siegwart , Olov Andersson

In the last decade, Deep Reinforcement Learning has evolved into a powerful tool for complex sequential decision-making problems. It combines deep learning's proficiency in processing rich input signals with reinforcement learning's…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-11 Julien Roy

While using shaped rewards can be beneficial when solving sparse reward tasks, their successful application often requires careful engineering and is problem specific. For instance, in tasks where the agent must achieve some goal state,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2019-11-05 Alexander Trott , Stephan Zheng , Caiming Xiong , Richard Socher

Designing reward functions that guide generative molecular design (GMD) algorithms to desirable areas of chemical space is of critical importance in AI-driven drug discovery. Traditionally, this has been a manual and error-prone task; the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-18 Marius Urbonas , Temitope Ajileye , Paul Gainer , Douglas Pires

In order to solve a task using reinforcement learning, it is necessary to first formalise the goal of that task as a reward function. However, for many real-world tasks, it is very difficult to manually specify a reward function that never…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-13 Joar Skalse , Lucy Farnik , Sumeet Ramesh Motwani , Erik Jenner , Adam Gleave , Alessandro Abate

Recent advancements in large language models have heavily relied on the large reward model from reinforcement learning from human feedback for fine-tuning. However, the use of a single reward model across various domains may not always be…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-26 Hyuk Namgoong , Jeesu Jung , Sangkeun Jung , Yoonhyung Roh

Reinforcement learning usually uses the feedback rewards of environmental to train agents. But the rewards in the actual environment are sparse, and even some environments will not rewards. Most of the current methods are difficult to get…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-13 Kai Jiang , XiaoLong Qin

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

Reward functions are a common way to specify the objective of a robot. As designing reward functions can be extremely challenging, a more promising approach is to directly learn reward functions from human teachers. Importantly, data from…

Crowd simulation is important for video-games design, since it enables to populate virtual worlds with autonomous avatars that navigate in a human-like manner. Reinforcement learning has shown great potential in simulating virtual crowds,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-25 Ariel Kwiatkowski , Vicky Kalogeiton , Julien Pettré , Marie-Paule Cani

Real-time control for robotics is a popular research area in the reinforcement learning community. Through the use of techniques such as reward shaping, researchers have managed to train online agents across a multitude of domains. Despite…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-04-21 Mihai Anca , Jonathan D. Thomas , Dabal Pedamonti , Matthew Studley , Mark Hansen