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Related papers: Shaping Advice in Deep Reinforcement Learning

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Rewards play an essential role in reinforcement learning. In contrast to rule-based game environments with well-defined reward functions, complex real-world robotic applications, such as contact-rich manipulation, lack explicit and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-30 Yuning Wu , Jieliang Luo , Hui Li

Learning auxiliary tasks, such as multiple predictions about the world, can provide many benefits to reinforcement learning systems. A variety of off-policy learning algorithms have been developed to learn such predictions, but as yet there…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-24 Matthew McLeod , Chunlok Lo , Matthew Schlegel , Andrew Jacobsen , Raksha Kumaraswamy , Martha White , Adam White

Reinforcement Learning (RL) in games has gained significant momentum in recent years, enabling the creation of different agent behaviors that can transform a player's gaming experience. However, deploying RL agents in production…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-07-01 António Afonso , Iolanda Leite , Alessandro Sestini , Florian Fuchs , Konrad Tollmar , Linus Gisslén

Reinforcement Learning has emerged as a strong alternative to solve optimization tasks efficiently. The use of these algorithms highly depends on the feedback signals provided by the environment in charge of informing about how good (or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-01 Alain Andres , Esther Villar-Rodriguez , Javier Del Ser

Reinforcement learning (RL), a common tool in decision making, learns control policies from various experiences based on the associated cumulative return/rewards without treating them differently. Humans, on the contrary, often learn to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-25 Mingkang Wu , Devin White , Vernon Lawhern , Nicholas R. Waytowich , Yongcan Cao

Reinforcement learning has been successful in training autonomous agents to accomplish goals in complex environments. Although this has been adapted to multiple settings, including robotics and computer games, human players often find it…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-01-22 Baicen Xiao , Qifan Lu , Bhaskar Ramasubramanian , Andrew Clark , Linda Bushnell , Radha Poovendran

Offline reinforcement learning refers to the process of learning policies from fixed datasets, without requiring additional environment interaction. However, it often relies on well-defined reward functions, which are difficult and…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-13 Xiancheng Gao , Yufeng Shi , Wengang Zhou , Houqiang Li

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

In complex tasks where the reward function is not straightforward and consists of a set of objectives, multiple reinforcement learning (RL) policies that perform task adequately, but employ different strategies can be trained by adjusting…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-12-20 Jasmina Gajcin , Rahul Nair , Tejaswini Pedapati , Radu Marinescu , Elizabeth Daly , Ivana Dusparic

Reward shaping is effective in addressing the sparse-reward challenge in reinforcement learning (RL) by providing immediate feedback through auxiliary, informative rewards. Based on the reward shaping strategy, we propose a novel multi-task…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Haozhe Ma , Zhengding Luo , Thanh Vinh Vo , Kuankuan Sima , Tze-Yun Leong

Reward functions are central in specifying the task we want a reinforcement learning agent to perform. Given a task and desired optimal behavior, we study the problem of designing informative reward functions so that the designed rewards…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-13 Rati Devidze , Parameswaran Kamalaruban , Adish Singla

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

One of the challenges in applying reinforcement learning in a complex real-world environment lies in providing the agent with a sufficiently detailed reward function. Any misalignment between the reward and the desired behavior can result…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-24 Neta Glazer , Aviv Navon , Aviv Shamsian , Ethan Fetaya

We propose a generic reward shaping approach for improving the rate of convergence in reinforcement learning (RL), called Self Improvement Based REwards, or SIBRE. The approach is designed for use in conjunction with any existing RL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-22 Somjit Nath , Richa Verma , Abhik Ray , Harshad Khadilkar

The last few years have seen an explosion of interest in autonomous cyber defence agents based on deep reinforcement learning. Such agents are typically trained in a cyber gym environment, also known as a cyber simulator, at least 32 of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-11 Elizabeth Bates , Chris Hicks , Vasilios Mavroudis

Unlike reinforcement learning (RL) agents, humans remain capable multitaskers in changing environments. In spite of only experiencing the world through their own observations and interactions, people know how to balance focusing on tasks…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-07-02 Rishav Bhagat , Jonathan Balloch , Zhiyu Lin , Julia Kim , Mark Riedl

Critical sectors of human society are progressing toward the adoption of powerful artificial intelligence (AI) agents, which are trained individually on behalf of self-interested principals but deployed in a shared environment. Short of…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2021-12-22 Jiachen Yang , Ethan Wang , Rakshit Trivedi , Tuo Zhao , Hongyuan Zha

We introduce a class of learning problems where the agent is presented with a series of tasks. Intuitively, if there is relation among those tasks, then the information gained during execution of one task has value for the execution of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-09-06 Christos Dimitrakakis

Reinforcement Learning is an area of Machine Learning focused on how agents can be trained to make sequential decisions, and achieve a particular goal within an arbitrary environment. While learning, they repeatedly take actions based on…

Real-world applications require a robot operating in the physical world with awareness of potential risks besides accomplishing the task. A large part of risky behaviors arises from interacting with objects in ignorance of affordance. To…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-06-28 Meng Song , Yuhan Liu , Zhengqin Li , Manmohan Chandraker