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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

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

The correct specification of reward models is a well-known challenge in reinforcement learning. Hand-crafted reward functions often lead to inefficient or suboptimal policies and may not be aligned with user values. Reinforcement learning…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-10-24 Muhan Lin , Shuyang Shi , Yue Guo , Behdad Chalaki , Vaishnav Tadiparthi , Ehsan Moradi Pari , Simon Stepputtis , Joseph Campbell , Katia Sycara

To convey desired behavior to a Reinforcement Learning (RL) agent, a designer must choose a reward function for the environment, arguably the most important knob designers have in interacting with RL agents. Although many reward functions…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-01 Henry Sowerby , Zhiyuan Zhou , Michael L. Littman

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,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-13 Grant C. Forbes , Nitish Gupta , Leonardo Villalobos-Arias , Colin M. Potts , Arnav Jhala , David L. Roberts

To achieve the ambitious goals of artificial intelligence, reinforcement learning must include planning with a model of the world that is abstract in state and time. Deep learning has made progress with state abstraction, but temporal…

The objective of a reinforcement learning agent is to discover better actions through exploration. However, typical exploration techniques aim to maximize rewards, often incurring high costs in both exploration and learning processes. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-24 Akane Tsuboya , Yu Kono , Tatsuji Takahashi

Reinforcement learning algorithms describe how an agent can learn an optimal action policy in a sequential decision process, through repeated experience. In a given environment, the agent policy provides him some running and terminal…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2020-03-24 Arthur Charpentier , Romuald Elie , Carl Remlinger

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…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-11-04 Yuchen Wu , Melissa Mozifian , Florian Shkurti

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has progressed from simple control tasks to complex real-world challenges with large state spaces. While RL excels in these tasks, training time remains a limitation. Reward shaping is a popular solution, but…

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-28 Jacob Adamczyk , Volodymyr Makarenko , Stas Tiomkin , Rahul V. Kulkarni

In reinforcement learning (RL), agents continually interact with the environment and use the feedback to refine their behavior. To guide policy optimization, reward models are introduced as proxies of the desired objectives, such that when…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-19 Rui Yu , Shenghua Wan , Yucen Wang , Chen-Xiao Gao , Le Gan , Zongzhang Zhang , De-Chuan Zhan

Goal-conditioned reinforcement learning (RL) is an interesting extension of the traditional RL framework, where the dynamic environment and reward sparsity can cause conventional learning algorithms to fail. Reward shaping is a practical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-18 Hongyu Ding , Yuanze Tang , Qing Wu , Bo Wang , Chunlin Chen , Zhi Wang

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-24 Parameswaran Kamalaruban , Rati Devidze , Volkan Cevher , Adish Singla

Reward design is a critical part of the application of reinforcement learning, the performance of which strongly depends on how well the reward signal frames the goal of the designer and how well the signal assesses progress in reaching…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-01 Yixiang Wang , Yujing Hu , Feng Wu , Yingfeng Chen

This paper proposes a new reinforcement learning with hyperbolic discounting. Combining a new temporal difference error with the hyperbolic discounting in recursive manner and reward-punishment framework, a new scheme to learn the optimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-04 Taisuke Kobayashi

Designing optimal reward functions has been desired but extremely difficult in reinforcement learning (RL). When it comes to modern complex tasks, sophisticated reward functions are widely used to simplify policy learning yet even a tiny…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-07 Ning Wei , Jiahua Liang , Di Xie , Shiliang Pu

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-02 Chenyang Cao , Miguel Rogel-García , Mohamed Nabail , Xueqian Wang , Nicholas Rhinehart

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

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…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-08-21 Sukai Huang , Nir Lipovetzky , Trevor Cohn