Related papers: A new Potential-Based Reward Shaping for Reinforce…
In reinforcement learning, especially in sparse-reward domains, many environment steps are required to observe reward information. In order to increase the frequency of such observations, "potential-based reward shaping" (PBRS) has been…
The main challenge in developing effective reinforcement learning (RL) pipelines is often the design and tuning the reward functions. Well-designed shaping reward can lead to significantly faster learning. Naively formulated rewards,…
Potential-based reward shaping (PBRS) is an effective and popular technique to speed up reinforcement learning by leveraging domain knowledge. While PBRS is proven to always preserve optimal policies, its effect on learning speed is…
The use of Potential-Based Reward Shaping (PBRS) has shown great promise in the ongoing research effort to tackle sample inefficiency in Reinforcement Learning (RL). However, choosing the right potential function remains an open challenge.…
Reinforcement learning, which acquires a policy maximizing long-term rewards, has been actively studied. Unfortunately, this learning type is too slow and difficult to use in practical situations because the state-action space becomes huge…
Reinforcement learning is a powerful learning paradigm in which agents can learn to maximize sparse and delayed reward signals. Although RL has had many impressive successes in complex domains, learning can take hours, days, or even years…
The automatic synthesis of policies for robotic-control tasks through reinforcement learning relies on a reward signal that simultaneously captures many possibly conflicting requirements. In this paper, we in\-tro\-duce a novel,…
Reward shaping is one of the most effective methods to tackle the crucial yet challenging problem of credit assignment in Reinforcement Learning (RL). However, designing shaping functions usually requires much expert knowledge and…
Recently there has been a proliferation of intrinsic motivation (IM) reward-shaping methods to learn in complex and sparse-reward environments. These methods can often inadvertently change the set of optimal policies in an environment,…
Learning to solve sparse-reward reinforcement learning problems is difficult, due to the lack of guidance towards the goal. But in some problems, prior knowledge can be used to augment the learning process. Reward shaping is a way to…
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,…
Reinforcement learning provides an automated framework for learning behaviors from high-level reward specifications, but in practice the choice of reward function can be crucial for good results -- while in principle the reward only needs…
Learning to produce efficient movement behaviour for humanoid robots from scratch is a hard problem, as has been illustrated by the "Learning to run" competition at NIPS 2017. The goal of this competition was to train a two-legged model of…
Teaching agents to follow complex written instructions has been an important yet elusive goal. One technique for enhancing learning efficiency is language reward shaping (LRS). Within a reinforcement learning (RL) framework, LRS involves…
In continuing tasks, average-reward reinforcement learning may be a more appropriate problem formulation than the more common discounted reward formulation. As usual, learning an optimal policy in this setting typically requires a large…
Potential-based reward shaping is commonly used to incorporate prior knowledge of how to solve the task into reinforcement learning because it can formally guarantee policy invariance. As such, the optimal policy and the ordering of…
Reinforcement learning (RL) has successfully automated the complex process of mining formulaic alpha factors, for creating interpretable and profitable investment strategies. However, existing methods are hampered by the sparse rewards…
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…
Preference-based Reinforcement Learning (PbRL) provides a way to learn high-performance policies in environments where the reward signal is hard to specify, avoiding heuristic and time-consuming reward design. However, PbRL can suffer from…
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…