Related papers: Reward Shaping for Reinforcement Learning with Ome…
We provide the first solution for model-free reinforcement learning of {\omega}-regular objectives for Markov decision processes (MDPs). We present a constructive reduction from the almost-sure satisfaction of {\omega}-regular objectives to…
When omega-regular objectives were first proposed in model-free reinforcement learning (RL) for controlling MDPs, deterministic Rabin automata were used in an attempt to provide a direct translation from their transitions to scalar values.…
We characterize the class of nondeterministic ${\omega}$-automata that can be used for the analysis of finite Markov decision processes (MDPs). We call these automata `good-for-MDPs' (GFM). We show that GFM automata are closed under classic…
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…
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,…
This letter proposes a novel reinforcement learning method for the synthesis of a control policy satisfying a control specification described by a linear temporal logic formula. We assume that the controlled system is modeled by a Markov…
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…
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…
The potential benefits of model-free reinforcement learning to real robotics systems are limited by its uninformed exploration that leads to slow convergence, lack of data-efficiency, and unnecessary interactions with the environment. To…
One major limitation to the applicability of Reinforcement Learning (RL) to many practical domains is the large number of samples required to learn an optimal policy. To address this problem and improve learning efficiency, we consider a…
Recent advances in reinforcement learning (RL) have renewed interest in reward design for shaping agent behavior, but manually crafting reward functions is tedious and error-prone. A principled alternative is to specify behavioral…
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…
Training reinforcement learning (RL) agents using scalar reward signals is often infeasible when an environment has sparse and non-Markovian rewards. Moreover, handcrafting these reward functions before training is prone to…
Intrinsic motivation and reward shaping guide reinforcement learning (RL) agents by adding pseudo-rewards, which can lead to useful emergent behaviors. However, they can also encourage counterproductive exploits, e.g., fixation with noisy…
Current reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) pipelines for large language model (LLM) alignment typically assign scalar rewards to sequences, using the final token as a surrogate indicator for the quality of the entire…
Deep reinforcement learning approaches have been a popular method for visual navigation tasks in the computer vision and robotics community of late. In most cases, the reward function has a binary structure, i.e., a large positive reward is…
We study the reward-free reinforcement learning framework, which is particularly suitable for batch reinforcement learning and scenarios where one needs policies for multiple reward functions. This framework has two phases. In the…
We study reinforcement learning for the optimal control of Branching Markov Decision Processes (BMDPs), a natural extension of (multitype) Branching Markov Chains (BMCs). The state of a (discrete-time) BMCs is a collection of entities of…
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…
Reward shaping is a technique in reinforcement learning that addresses the sparse-reward problem by providing more frequent and informative rewards. We introduce a self-adaptive and highly efficient reward shaping mechanism that…