English
Related papers

Related papers: Reward Shaping with Dynamic Trajectory Aggregation

200 papers

Reinforcement learning (RL) often struggles in real-world tasks with high-dimensional state spaces and long horizons, where sparse or fixed rewards severely slow down exploration and cause agents to get trapped in local optima. This paper…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-04-20 Hürkan Şahin , Van Huyen Dang , Erdi Sayar , Alper Yegenoglu , Erdal Kayacan

Achieving high-fidelity generation in extremely few sampling steps has long been a central goal of generative modeling. Existing approaches largely rely on distillation-based frameworks to compress the original multi-step denoising process…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Rui Li , Bingyu Li , Yuanzhi Liang , Haibin Huang , Chi Zhang , XueLong Li

Video generation models produce visually coherent content but struggle with tasks requiring spatial reasoning and multi-step planning. Reinforcement learning (RL) offers a path to improve generalization, but its effectiveness in video…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Ming Liu , Yunbei Zhang , Shilong Liu , Liwen Wang , Wensheng Zhang

One of the fundamental challenges in reinforcement learning (RL) is the one of data efficiency: modern algorithms require a very large number of training samples, especially compared to humans, for solving environments with high-dimensional…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-10 Hlynur Davíð Hlynsson , Laurenz Wiskott

Sparse and delayed reward functions pose a significant obstacle for real-world Reinforcement Learning (RL) applications. In this work, we propose Attention-based REward Shaping (ARES), a general and robust algorithm which uses a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-19 Ian Holmes , Min Chi

Designing effective reward functions remains a central challenge in reinforcement learning, especially in multi-objective environments. In this work, we propose Multi-Objective Reward Shaping with Exploration (MORSE), a general framework…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-18 Yuqing Xie , Jiayu Chen , Wenhao Tang , Ya Zhang , Chao Yu , Yu Wang

Deep reinforcement learning excels in continuous control but often requires extensive exploration, while physics-based models demand complete equations and suffer cubic complexity. This study proposes Hybrid Energy-Aware Reward Shaping…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Qijun Liao , Jue Yang , Yiting Kang , Xinxin Zhao , Yong Zhang , Mingan Zhao

In environments with sparse or delayed rewards, reinforcement learning (RL) incurs high sample complexity due to the large number of interactions needed for learning. This limitation has motivated the use of large language models (LLMs) for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-23 Narjes Nourzad , Carlee Joe-Wong

Sparse rewards are a major bottleneck in multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), where simultaneous learning induces non-stationarity and makes reward design especially delicate. Reward shaping can accelerate learning, but in the…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2026-05-25 Elie Abboud , Oren Gal

Model-based reinforcement learning (RL) is appealing because (i) it enables planning and thus more strategic exploration, and (ii) by decoupling dynamics from rewards, it enables fast transfer to new reward functions. However, learning an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-14 Evan Zheran Liu , Ramtin Keramati , Sudarshan Seshadri , Kelvin Guu , Panupong Pasupat , Emma Brunskill , Percy Liang

Common approaches to Reinforcement Learning (RL) are seriously challenged by large-scale applications involving huge state spaces and sparse delayed reward feedback. Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning (HRL) methods attempt to address this…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2019-04-15 Jacob Rafati , David C. Noelle

Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) is computationally challenging, with common approaches requiring the solution of multiple reinforcement learning (RL) sub-problems. This work motivates the use of potential-based reward shaping to reduce…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-19 Lauren H. Cooke , Harvey Klyne , Edwin Zhang , Cassidy Laidlaw , Milind Tambe , Finale Doshi-Velez

While deep reinforcement learning techniques have led to agents that are successfully able to learn to perform a number of tasks that had been previously unlearnable, these techniques are still susceptible to the longstanding problem of…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2019-11-05 Nicholas Waytowich , Sean L. Barton , Vernon Lawhern , Garrett Warnell

In many real-world scenarios, reward signal for agents are exceedingly sparse, making it challenging to learn an effective reward function for reward shaping. To address this issue, the proposed approach in this paper performs reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-18 Wenyun Li , Wenjie Huang , Chen Sun

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…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2015-03-24 Anna Harutyunyan , Tim Brys , Peter Vrancx , Ann Nowe

Reinforcement learning has become a cornerstone for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models, where group-based approaches such as GRPO have emerged as efficient paradigms that optimize policies by leveraging…

Data assimilation, in its most comprehensive form, addresses the Bayesian inverse problem of identifying plausible state trajectories that explain noisy or incomplete observations of stochastic dynamical systems. Various approaches have…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-01 François Rozet , Gilles Louppe

Reward shaping has been applied widely to accelerate Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents' training. However, a principled way of designing effective reward shaping functions, especially for complex continuous control problems, remains…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-12 Mateo Juliani , Mingxuan Li , Elias Bareinboim

Learning a policy capable of moving an agent between any two states in the environment is important for many robotics problems involving navigation and manipulation. Due to the sparsity of rewards in such tasks, applying reinforcement…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-07-05 Artem Molchanov , Karol Hausman , Stan Birchfield , Gaurav Sukhatme

Reward learning enables robots to learn adaptable behaviors from human input. Traditional methods model the reward as a linear function of hand-crafted features, but that requires specifying all the relevant features a priori, which is…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-01-19 Andreea Bobu , Marius Wiggert , Claire Tomlin , Anca D. Dragan