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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…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-07-19 Srirangan Madhavan , Anwesan Pal , Henrik I. Christensen

This paper augments the reward received by a reinforcement learning agent with potential functions in order to help the agent learn (possibly stochastic) optimal policies. We show that a potential-based reward shaping scheme is able to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-07-23 Baicen Xiao , Bhaskar Ramasubramanian , Andrew Clark , Hannaneh Hajishirzi , Linda Bushnell , Radha Poovendran

We consider the problem of reinforcement learning under safety requirements, in which an agent is trained to complete a given task, typically formalized as the maximization of a reward signal over time, while concurrently avoiding…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-09-25 Tu-Hoa Pham , Giovanni De Magistris , Don Joven Agravante , Subhajit Chaudhury , Asim Munawar , Ryuki Tachibana

We investigate the effect of reward shaping in improving the performance of reinforcement learning in the context of the real-time strategy, capture-the-flag game. The game is characterized by sparse rewards that are associated with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-29 John Kliem , Prithviraj Dasgupta

As machine learning models become more capable, they have exhibited increased potential in solving complex tasks. One of the most promising directions uses deep reinforcement learning to train autonomous agents in computer network defense…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-23 Elizabeth Bates , Vasilios Mavroudis , Chris Hicks

Despite seminal advances in reinforcement learning in recent years, many domains where the rewards are sparse, e.g. given only at task completion, remain quite challenging. In such cases, it can be beneficial to tackle the task both from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-25 Yaron Shoham , Gal Elidan

Reward shaping (RS) is a powerful method in reinforcement learning (RL) for overcoming the problem of sparse or uninformative rewards. However, RS typically relies on manually engineered shaping-reward functions whose construction is…

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

While recent progress in deep reinforcement learning has enabled robots to learn complex behaviors, tasks with long horizons and sparse rewards remain an ongoing challenge. In this work, we propose an effective reward shaping method through…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-04 Xingyu Lu , Stas Tiomkin , Pieter Abbeel

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.…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-06-20 Ingy ElSayed-Aly , Lu Feng

Real-time control for robotics is a popular research area in the reinforcement learning community. Through the use of techniques such as reward shaping, researchers have managed to train online agents across a multitude of domains. Despite…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-04-21 Mihai Anca , Jonathan D. Thomas , Dabal Pedamonti , Matthew Studley , Mark Hansen

Reinforcement learning is a powerful learning paradigm in which agents can learn to maximize sparse and delayed reward signals. Although RL has had many impressive successes in complex domains, learning can take hours, days, or even years…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-04 Paniz Behboudian , Yash Satsangi , Matthew E. Taylor , Anna Harutyunyan , Michael Bowling

The automatic synthesis of policies for robotic-control tasks through reinforcement learning relies on a reward signal that simultaneously captures many possibly conflicting requirements. In this paper, we in\-tro\-duce a novel,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-04 Luigi Berducci , Edgar A. Aguilar , Dejan Ničković , Radu Grosu

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-31 Sinan Ibrahim , Mostafa Mostafa , Ali Jnadi , Hadi Salloum , Pavel Osinenko

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-14 Takato Okudo , Seiji Yamada

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-24 Ryan Koo , Ian Yang , Vipul Raheja , Mingyi Hong , Kwang-Sung Jun , Dongyeop Kang

Data generation and labeling are usually an expensive part of learning for robotics. While active learning methods are commonly used to tackle the former problem, preference-based learning is a concept that attempts to solve the latter by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-10-11 Erdem Bıyık , Dorsa Sadigh

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

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 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