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Related papers: Designing Rewards for Fast Learning

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Autonomous agents must often deal with conflicting requirements, such as completing tasks using the least amount of time/energy, learning multiple tasks, or dealing with multiple opponents. In the context of reinforcement learning~(RL),…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-30 Santiago Paternain , Luiz F. O. Chamon , Miguel Calvo-Fullana , Alejandro Ribeiro

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a central problem in artificial intelligence. This problem consists of defining artificial agents that can learn optimal behaviour by interacting with an environment -- where the optimal behaviour is defined…

In traditional reinforcement learning (RL), the learner aims to solve a single objective optimization problem: find the policy that maximizes expected reward. However, in many real-world settings, it is important to optimize over multiple…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-18 Eric Eaton , Marcel Hussing , Michael Kearns , Aaron Roth , Sikata Bela Sengupta , Jessica Sorrell

This paper explores multiple optimization methods to improve the performance of rating-based reinforcement learning (RbRL). RbRL, a method based on the idea of human ratings, has been developed to infer reward functions in reward-free…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-15 Evelyn Rose , Devin White , Mingkang Wu , Vernon Lawhern , Nicholas R. Waytowich , Yongcan Cao

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

There has been significant progress in deep reinforcement learning (RL) in recent years. Nevertheless, finding suitable hyperparameter configurations and reward functions remains challenging even for experts, and performance heavily relies…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-10 Julian Dierkes , Emma Cramer , Holger H. Hoos , Sebastian Trimpe

Commonly in reinforcement learning (RL), rewards are discounted over time using an exponential function to model time preference, thereby bounding the expected long-term reward. In contrast, in economics and psychology, it has been shown…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-08 Matthias Schultheis , Constantin A. Rothkopf , Heinz Koeppl

Reinforcement learning (RL) in long horizon and sparse reward tasks is notoriously difficult and requires a lot of training steps. A standard solution to speed up the process is to leverage additional reward signals, shaping it to better…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-10-14 Thomas Carta , Pierre-Yves Oudeyer , Olivier Sigaud , Sylvain Lamprier

In Reinforcement Learning (RL), it is commonly assumed that an immediate reward signal is generated for each action taken by the agent, helping the agent maximize cumulative rewards to obtain the optimal policy. However, in many real-world…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-29 Yuting Tang , Xin-Qiang Cai , Yao-Xiang Ding , Qiyu Wu , Guoqing Liu , Masashi Sugiyama

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…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-12-05 Anand Balakrishnan , Stefan Jakšić , Edgar A. Aguilar , Dejan Ničković , Jyotirmoy V. Deshmukh

Reinforcement learning usually uses the feedback rewards of environmental to train agents. But the rewards in the actual environment are sparse, and even some environments will not rewards. Most of the current methods are difficult to get…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-13 Kai Jiang , XiaoLong Qin

Optimal designs are usually model-dependent and likely to be sub-optimal if the postulated model is not correctly specified. In practice, it is common that a researcher has a list of candidate models at hand and a design has to be found…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2023-03-29 Mingyao Ai , Holger Dette , Zhengfu Liu , Jun Yu

Learning about many things can provide numerous benefits to a reinforcement learning system. For example, learning many auxiliary value functions, in addition to optimizing the environmental reward, appears to improve both exploration and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-25 Cam Linke , Nadia M. Ady , Martha White , Thomas Degris , Adam White

Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has achieved great success in solving complicated decision-making problems. Despite the successes, DRL is frequently criticized for many reasons, e.g., data inefficient, inflexible and intractable reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-07 Weiqin Chen

For task-oriented dialog systems, training a Reinforcement Learning (RL) based Dialog Management module suffers from low sample efficiency and slow convergence speed due to the sparse rewards in RL.To solve this problem, many strategies…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-04-13 Zhengxu Hou , Bang Liu , Ruihui Zhao , Zijing Ou , Yafei Liu , Xi Chen , Yefeng Zheng

Large Language Models (LLMs) consistently benefit from scaled Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning, but also suffer from heavy computational overhead. To address this issue, efficient reasoning aims to incentivize short yet accurate thinking…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-23 Taiqiang Wu , Zenan Xu , Bo Zhou , Ngai Wong

The challenge of designing effective reward functions in reinforcement learning (RL) represents a significant bottleneck, often requiring extensive human expertise and being time-consuming. Previous work and recent advancements in large…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-25 Franklin Cardenoso , Wouter Caarls

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…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-06-18 Yufei Wang , Zhanyi Sun , Jesse Zhang , Zhou Xian , Erdem Biyik , David Held , Zackory Erickson

Reinforcement learning provides an automated framework for learning behaviors from high-level reward specifications, but in practice the choice of reward function can be crucial for good results -- while in principle the reward only needs…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-19 Abhishek Gupta , Aldo Pacchiano , Yuexiang Zhai , Sham M. Kakade , Sergey Levine

The main challenge in developing effective reinforcement learning (RL) pipelines is often the design and tuning the reward functions. Well-designed shaping reward can lead to significantly faster learning. Naively formulated rewards,…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-07-20 Se Hwan Jeon , Steve Heim , Charles Khazoom , Sangbae Kim