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Reward design for reinforcement learning agents can be difficult in situations where one not only wants the agent to achieve some effect in the world but where one also cares about how that effect is achieved. For example, we might wish for…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-01-25 Xiangyu Peng , Christopher Cui , Wei Zhou , Renee Jia , Mark Riedl

Text-based games present a unique class of sequential decision making problem in which agents interact with a partially observable, simulated environment via actions and observations conveyed through natural language. Such observations…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-10 Mathieu Tuli , Andrew C. Li , Pashootan Vaezipoor , Toryn Q. Klassen , Scott Sanner , Sheila A. McIlraith

Training agents using Reinforcement Learning in games with sparse rewards is a challenging problem, since large amounts of exploration are required to retrieve even the first reward. To tackle this problem, a common approach is to use…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-09 Shengyi Huang , Santiago Ontañón

This work presents an exploration and imitation-learning-based agent capable of state-of-the-art performance in playing text-based computer games. Text-based computer games describe their world to the player through natural language and…

Soft actor-critic (SAC) is a popular algorithm for max-entropy reinforcement learning. In practice, the energy-based policies in SAC are often approximated using simple policy classes for efficiency, sacrificing the expressiveness and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-01 Yuyang Zhang , Yang Hu , Bo Dai , Na Li

The ability to learn optimal control policies in systems where action space is defined by sentences in natural language would allow many interesting real-world applications such as automatic optimisation of dialogue systems. Text-based…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2018-01-09 Mikuláš Zelinka

Controlled text generation tasks such as unsupervised text style transfer have increasingly adopted the use of Reinforcement Learning (RL). A major challenge in applying RL to such tasks is the sparse reward, which is available only after…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-04-19 Bhargav Upadhyay , Akhilesh Sudhakar , Arjun Maheswaran

Text-based games(TBG) are complex environments which allow users or computer agents to make textual interactions and achieve game goals.In TBG agent design and training process, balancing the efficiency and performance of the agent models…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-09-13 Chen Chen , Yue Dai , Josiah Poon , Caren Han

In this paper, we consider the task of learning control policies for text-based games. In these games, all interactions in the virtual world are through text and the underlying state is not observed. The resulting language barrier makes…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2015-09-15 Karthik Narasimhan , Tejas Kulkarni , Regina Barzilay

In many real-world scenarios, reward signal for agents are exceedingly sparse, making it challenging to learn an effective reward function for reward shaping. To address this issue, the proposed approach in this paper performs reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-18 Wenyun Li , Wenjie Huang , Chen Sun

Automated vehicle control using reinforcement learning (RL) has attracted significant attention due to its potential to learn driving policies through environment interaction. However, RL agents often face training challenges in sample…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-09-08 Zhihao Zhang , Chengyang Peng , Ekim Yurtsever , Keith A. Redmill

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 this paper we proposed reinforcement learning algorithms with the generalized reward function. In our proposed method we use Q-learning and SARSA algorithms with generalised reward function to train the reinforcement learning agent. We…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2016-02-17 Harshit Sethy , Amit Patel

Deploying reinforcement learning in the real world remains challenging due to sample inefficiency, sparse rewards, and noisy visual observations. Prior work leverages demonstrations and human feedback to improve learning efficiency and…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-23 Xiefeng Wu , Mingyu Hu , Shu Zhang

Finding meaningful and accurate dense rewards is a fundamental task in the field of reinforcement learning (RL) that enables agents to explore environments more efficiently. In traditional RL settings, agents learn optimal policies through…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-05 Shuyuan Zhang

We present Distributional Soft Actor-Critic (DSAC), a distributional reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm that combines the strengths of distributional information of accumulated rewards and entropy-driven exploration from Soft…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-01 Xiaoteng Ma , Junyao Chen , Li Xia , Jun Yang , Qianchuan Zhao , Zhengyuan Zhou

Text-based games are suitable test-beds for designing agents that can learn by interaction with the environment in the form of natural language text. Very recently, deep reinforcement learning based agents have been successfully applied for…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2018-05-21 Ghulam Ahmed Ansari , Sagar J P , Sarath Chandar , Balaraman Ravindran

Modern video games are becoming richer and more complex in terms of game mechanics. This complexity allows for the emergence of a wide variety of ways to play the game across the players. From the point of view of the game designer, this…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-11-30 Pierre Le Pelletier de Woillemont , Rémi Labory , Vincent Corruble

Reinforcement learning (RL) can align language models with non-differentiable reward signals, such as human preferences. However, a major challenge arises from the sparsity of these reward signals - typically, there is only a single reward…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-20 Meng Cao , Lei Shu , Lei Yu , Yun Zhu , Nevan Wichers , Yinxiao Liu , Lei Meng

Reinforcement learning (RL) is an effective approach to motion planning in autonomous driving, where an optimal driving policy can be automatically learned using the interaction data with the environment. Nevertheless, the reward function…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-08-28 Lin-Chi Wu , Zengjie Zhang , Sofie Haesaert , Zhiqiang Ma , Zhiyong Sun