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Related papers: Reward Shaping via Meta-Learning

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Decomposing complex tasks into a sequence of simpler subtasks can improve learning efficiency for an autonomous agent. Reinforcement learning (RL) can be used to optimize agent policies to complete subtasks, but requires well-defined…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Nicholas Potteiger , Ankita Samaddar , Taylor T. Johnson , Xenofon Koutsoukos

Well-designed dense reward functions in robot manipulation not only indicate whether a task is completed but also encode progress along the way. Generally, designing dense rewards is challenging and usually requires access to privileged…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-03-19 Pierre Krack , Tobias Jülg , Wolfram Burgard , Florian Walter

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has achieved remarkable success in various domains, yet it often relies on carefully designed programmatic reward functions to guide agent behavior. Designing such reward functions can be challenging and may not…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-06 Qi Wang , Mian Wu , Yuyang Zhang , Mingqi Yuan , Wenyao Zhang , Haoxiang You , Yunbo Wang , Xin Jin , Xiaokang Yang , Wenjun Zeng

Reward function design and exploration time are arguably the biggest obstacles to the deployment of reinforcement learning (RL) agents in the real world. In many real-world tasks, designing a reward function takes considerable hand…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2017-06-14 Pierre Sermanet , Kelvin Xu , Sergey Levine

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

Reinforcement Learning (RL) heavily relies on the careful design of the reward function. However, accurately assigning rewards to each state-action pair in Long-Term Reinforcement Learning (LTRL) tasks remains a significant challenge. As a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Qi Ju , Falin Hei , Zhemei Fang , Yunfeng Luo

The problem of reinforcement learning is considered where the environment or the model undergoes a change. An algorithm is proposed that an agent can apply in such a problem to achieve the optimal long-time discounted reward. The algorithm…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-04-25 Wuxia Chen , Taposh Banerjee , Jemin George , Carl Busart

Reinforcement learning often needs to deal with the exponential growth of states and actions when exploring optimal control in high-dimensional spaces (often known as the curse of dimensionality). In this work, we address this issue by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-23 Yining Li , Peizhong Ju , Ness Shroff

One approach for improving sample efficiency in cooperative multi-agent learning is to decompose overall tasks into sub-tasks that can be assigned to individual agents. We study this problem in the context of reward machines: symbolic tasks…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2025-02-20 Ameesh Shah , Niklas Lauffer , Thomas Chen , Nikhil Pitta , Sanjit A. Seshia

Recently, video-based world models that learn to simulate the dynamics have gained increasing attention in robot learning. However, current approaches primarily emphasize visual generative quality while overlooking physical fidelity,…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-01-21 Baorui Peng , Wenyao Zhang , Liang Xu , Zekun Qi , Jiazhao Zhang , Hongsi Liu , Wenjun Zeng , Xin Jin

Reinforcement learning problems are often described through rewards that indicate if an agent has completed some task. This specification can yield desirable behavior, however many problems are difficult to specify in this manner, as one…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2016-08-15 Ashley Edwards , Charles Isbell , Atsuo Takanishi

Designing appropriate reward functions for Reinforcement Learning (RL) approaches has been a significant problem, especially for complex environments such as Atari games. Utilizing natural language instructions to provide intermediate…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-02-09 Ziyuan Cao , Reshma Anugundanahalli Ramachandra , Kelin Yu

The process of meta-learning algorithms from data, instead of relying on manual design, is growing in popularity as a paradigm for improving the performance of machine learning systems. Meta-learning shows particular promise for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-11 Alexander David Goldie , Zilin Wang , Jaron Cohen , Jakob Nicolaus Foerster , Shimon Whiteson

A crucial challenge in reinforcement learning is to reduce the number of interactions with the environment that an agent requires to master a given task. Transfer learning proposes to address this issue by re-using knowledge from previously…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-28 Remo Sasso , Matthia Sabatelli , Marco A. Wiering

In meta reinforcement learning (meta RL), an agent learns from a set of training tasks how to quickly solve a new task, drawn from the same task distribution. The optimal meta RL policy, a.k.a. the Bayes-optimal behavior, is well defined,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-01 Zohar Rimon , Aviv Tamar , Gilad Adler

Meta reinforcement learning (Meta-RL) methods such as RL$^2$ have emerged as promising approaches for learning data-efficient RL algorithms tailored to a given task distribution. However, they show poor asymptotic performance and struggle…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-29 Abhinav Bhatia , Samer B. Nashed , Shlomo Zilberstein

Meta-learning considers the problem of learning an efficient learning process that can leverage its past experience to accurately solve new tasks. However, the efficacy of meta-learning crucially depends on the distribution of tasks…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-11-03 Trapit Bansal , Karthick Gunasekaran , Tong Wang , Tsendsuren Munkhdalai , Andrew McCallum

Reinforcement learning (RL) often encounters delayed and sparse feedback in real-world applications, even with only episodic rewards. Previous approaches have made some progress in reward redistribution for credit assignment but still face…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-10 Yun Qu , Yuhang Jiang , Boyuan Wang , Yixiu Mao , Cheems Wang , Chang Liu , Xiangyang Ji

Diffusion models excel at modeling complex data distributions, including those of images, proteins, and small molecules. However, in many cases, our goal is to model parts of the distribution that maximize certain properties: for example,…

Long-term temporal credit assignment is an important challenge in deep reinforcement learning (RL). It refers to the ability of the agent to attribute actions to consequences that may occur after a long time interval. Existing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-27 Tanmay Gangwani , Yuan Zhou , Jian Peng