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Related papers: Designing Rewards for Fast Learning

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Learning effective policies for sparse objectives is a key challenge in Deep Reinforcement Learning (RL). A common approach is to design task-related dense rewards to improve task learnability. While such rewards are easily interpreted,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-12 Hassam Sheikh , Shauharda Khadka , Santiago Miret , Somdeb Majumdar

Reinforcement learning (RL), particularly in sparse reward settings, often requires prohibitively large numbers of interactions with the environment, thereby limiting its applicability to complex problems. To address this, several prior…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-20 Prasoon Goyal , Scott Niekum , Raymond J. Mooney

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

This research focuses on enhancing reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms by integrating penalty functions to guide agents in avoiding unwanted actions while optimizing rewards. The goal is to improve the learning process by ensuring that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-07 Sai Gana Sandeep Pula , Sathish A. P. Kumar , Sumit Jha , Arvind Ramanathan

We study the reward-free reinforcement learning framework, which is particularly suitable for batch reinforcement learning and scenarios where one needs policies for multiple reward functions. This framework has two phases. In the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-26 Zihan Zhang , Simon S. Du , Xiangyang Ji

Reinforcement learning (RL) is inspired by the way human infants and animals learn from the environment. The setting is somewhat idealized because, in actual tasks, other agents in the environment have their own goals and behave adaptively…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2023-10-31 Yue Lin , Wenhao Li , Hongyuan Zha , Baoxiang Wang

We seek to align agent behavior with a user's objectives in a reinforcement learning setting with unknown dynamics, an unknown reward function, and unknown unsafe states. The user knows the rewards and unsafe states, but querying the user…

Computers and Society · Computer Science 2021-03-26 Siddharth Reddy , Anca D. Dragan , Sergey Levine , Shane Legg , Jan Leike

Learning a reward function from human preferences is challenging as it typically requires having a high-fidelity simulator or using expensive and potentially unsafe actual physical rollouts in the environment. However, in many tasks the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-05 Daniel Shin , Anca D. Dragan , Daniel S. Brown

Reward machines are an established tool for dealing with reinforcement learning problems in which rewards are sparse and depend on complex sequences of actions. However, existing algorithms for learning reward machines assume an overly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-20 Jan Corazza , Ivan Gavran , Daniel Neider

Flexibility design problems are a class of problems that appear in strategic decision-making across industries, where the objective is to design a ($e.g.$, manufacturing) network that affords flexibility and adaptivity. The underlying…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-19 Yehua Wei , Lei Zhang , Ruiyi Zhang , Shijing Si , Hao Zhang , Lawrence Carin

Solving a reinforcement learning problem typically involves correctly prespecifying the reward signal from which the algorithm learns. Here, we approach the problem of reward signal design by using an evolutionary approach to perform a…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2021-05-19 Rafal Muszynski , Katja Hofmann , Jun Wang

Transfer of recent advances in deep reinforcement learning to real-world applications is hindered by high data demands and thus low efficiency and scalability. Through independent improvements of components such as replay buffers or more…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-28 André Eberhard , Houssam Metni , Georg Fahland , Alexander Stroh , Pascal Friederich

Mathematical reasoning is a key benchmark for large language models. Reinforcement learning is a standard post-training mechanism for improving the reasoning capabilities of large language models, yet performance remains sensitive to the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Arash Ahmadi , Sarah Sharif , Yaser , Banad

Dental disease is one of the most common chronic diseases despite being largely preventable. However, professional advice on optimal oral hygiene practices is often forgotten or abandoned by patients. Therefore patients may benefit from…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-09-15 Anna L. Trella , Kelly W. Zhang , Inbal Nahum-Shani , Vivek Shetty , Finale Doshi-Velez , Susan A. Murphy

In reinforcement learning (RL), sparse rewards are a natural way to specify the task to be learned. However, most RL algorithms struggle to learn in this setting since the learning signal is mostly zeros. In contrast, humans are good at…

Reinforcement learning (RL) agents with pre-specified reward functions cannot provide guaranteed safety across variety of circumstances that an uncertain system might encounter. To guarantee performance while assuring satisfaction of safety…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-04-20 Aquib Mustafa , Majid Mazouchi , Subramanya Nageshrao , Hamidreza Modares

Reward design is a fundamental, yet challenging aspect of reinforcement learning (RL). Researchers typically utilize feedback signals from the environment to handcraft a reward function, but this process is not always effective due to the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-11 Alexander Bukharin , Yixiao Li , Pengcheng He , Tuo Zhao

Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms assume that users specify tasks by manually writing down a reward function. However, this process can be laborious and demands considerable technical expertise. Can we devise RL algorithms that instead…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-03 Benjamin Eysenbach , Sergey Levine , Ruslan Salakhutdinov

Reward shaping allows reinforcement learning (RL) agents to accelerate learning by receiving additional reward signals. However, these signals can be difficult to design manually, especially for complex RL tasks. We propose a simple and…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-06-11 Niels Justesen , Sebastian Risi

Dynamic mechanism design studies how mechanism designers should allocate resources among agents in a time-varying environment. We consider the problem where the agents interact with the mechanism designer according to an unknown Markov…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-19 Shuang Qiu , Boxiang Lyu , Qinglin Meng , Zhaoran Wang , Zhuoran Yang , Michael I. Jordan