Related papers: Reward Shaping with Dynamic Trajectory Aggregation
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…
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…
Reinforcement learning methods require careful design involving a reward function to obtain the desired action policy for a given task. In the absence of hand-crafted reward functions, prior work on the topic has proposed several methods…
Many continuous control problems can be formulated as sparse-reward reinforcement learning (RL) tasks. In principle, online RL methods can automatically explore the state space to solve each new task. However, discovering sequences of…
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…
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,…
Reinforcement learning (RL) relies heavily on exploration to learn from its environment and maximize observed rewards. Therefore, it is essential to design a reward function that guarantees optimal learning from the received experience.…
One of the central challenges faced by a reinforcement learning (RL) agent is to effectively learn a (near-)optimal policy in environments with large state spaces having sparse and noisy feedback signals. In real-world applications, an…
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.…
The Inverse Reinforcement Learning (\textit{IRL}) problem has seen rapid evolution in the past few years, with important applications in domains like robotics, cognition, and health. In this work, we explore the inefficacy of current IRL…
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,…
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…
Text-based games are a popular testbed for language-based reinforcement learning (RL). In previous work, deep Q-learning is commonly used as the learning agent. Q-learning algorithms are challenging to apply to complex real-world domains…
In classic Reinforcement Learning (RL), the agent maximizes an additive objective of the visited states, e.g., a value function. Unfortunately, objectives of this type cannot model many real-world applications such as experiment design,…
Improving sample efficiency is central to Reinforcement Learning (RL), especially in environments where the rewards are sparse. Some recent approaches have proposed to specify reward functions as manually designed or learned reward…
This paper proposes a Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) approach for solving knapsack problem. The proposed method consists of a state aggregation step based on tabular reinforcement learning to extract features and construct states. The…
Reinforcement learning (RL) with sparse and deceptive rewards is challenging because non-zero rewards are rarely obtained. Hence, the gradient calculated by the agent can be stochastic and without valid information. Recent studies that…
We consider a Reinforcement Learning setup where an agent interacts with an environment in observation-reward-action cycles without any (esp.\ MDP) assumptions on the environment. State aggregation and more generally feature reinforcement…
The aim of Reinforcement Learning (RL) in real-world applications is to create systems capable of making autonomous decisions by learning from their environment through trial and error. This paper emphasizes the importance of reward…
Reinforcement learning (RL) has shown its strength in challenging sequential decision-making problems. The reward function in RL is crucial to the learning performance, as it serves as a measure of the task completion degree. In real-world…