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Reward engineering has long been a challenge in Reinforcement Learning (RL) research, as it often requires extensive human effort and iterative processes of trial-and-error to design effective reward functions. In this paper, we propose…
In this paper, we combine task-dependent reward shaping and task-independent proto-value functions to obtain reward dependent proto-value functions (RPVFs). In constructing the RPVFs we are making use of the immediate rewards which are…
Reward design is of great importance for solving complex tasks with reinforcement learning. Recent studies have explored using image-text similarity produced by vision-language models (VLMs) to augment rewards of a task with visual…
Reinforcement learning (RL) with continuous time and state/action spaces is often data-intensive and brittle under nuisance variability and shift, motivating methods that exploit value-preserving structures to stabilize and improve…
In reinforcement learning (RL), different reward functions can define the same optimal policy but result in drastically different learning performance. For some, the agent gets stuck with a suboptimal behavior, and for others, it solves the…
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…
Self-paced reinforcement learning (RL) aims to improve the data efficiency of learning by automatically creating sequences, namely curricula, of probability distributions over contexts. However, existing techniques for self-paced RL fail in…
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…
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…
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,…
In reinforcement learning (RL), the ability to utilize prior knowledge from previously solved tasks can allow agents to quickly solve new problems. In some cases, these new problems may be approximately solved by composing the solutions of…
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…
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…
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…
Model-free reinforcement learning (RL) is a powerful approach for learning control policies directly from high-dimensional state and observation. However, it tends to be data-inefficient, which is especially costly in robotic learning…
Reward-free reinforcement learning (RL) is a framework which is suitable for both the batch RL setting and the setting where there are many reward functions of interest. During the exploration phase, an agent collects samples without using…
Reinforcement learning (RL) has shown to be a valuable tool in training neural networks for autonomous motion planning. The application of RL to a specific problem is dependent on a reward signal to quantify how good or bad a certain action…
Reinforcement learning (RL) is a popular approach for robotic path planning in uncertain environments. However, the control policies trained for an RL agent crucially depend on user-defined, state-based reward functions. Poorly designed…
Aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) to cater to different human preferences, learning new skills, and unlearning harmful behavior is an important problem. Search-based methods, such as Best-of-N or Monte-Carlo Tree Search, are performant,…
Using learned reward functions (LRFs) as a means to solve sparse-reward reinforcement learning (RL) tasks has yielded some steady progress in task-complexity through the years. In this work, we question whether today's LRFs are best-suited…