Related papers: Reward Shaping for Improved Learning in Real-time …
While using shaped rewards can be beneficial when solving sparse reward tasks, their successful application often requires careful engineering and is problem specific. For instance, in tasks where the agent must achieve some goal state,…
Humans are spectacular reinforcement learners, constantly learning from and adjusting to experience and feedback. Unfortunately, this doesn't necessarily mean humans are fast learners. When tasks are challenging, learning can become…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Statistical spoken dialogue systems have the attractive property of being able to be optimised from data via interactions with real users. However in the reinforcement learning paradigm the dialogue manager (agent) often requires…
Learning to solve sparse-reward reinforcement learning problems is difficult, due to the lack of guidance towards the goal. But in some problems, prior knowledge can be used to augment the learning process. Reward shaping is a way to…
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…
Imitation learning is an effective alternative approach to learn a policy when the reward function is sparse. In this paper, we consider a challenging setting where an agent and an expert use different actions from each other. We assume…
Reinforcement learning methods require careful design involving a reward function to obtain the desired action policy for a given task. In the absence of hand-crafted reward functions, prior work on the topic has proposed several methods…
Reinforcement learning (RL) often struggles in real-world tasks with high-dimensional state spaces and long horizons, where sparse or fixed rewards severely slow down exploration and cause agents to get trapped in local optima. This paper…
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…
Reward functions are central in reinforcement learning (RL), guiding agents towards optimal decision-making. The complexity of RL tasks requires meticulously designed reward functions that effectively drive learning while avoiding…
Sparse rewards are a major bottleneck in multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), where simultaneous learning induces non-stationarity and makes reward design especially delicate. Reward shaping can accelerate learning, but in the…
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…
Text-based games are a popular testbed for language-based reinforcement learning (RL). In previous work, deep Q-learning is commonly used as the learning agent. Q-learning algorithms are challenging to apply to complex real-world domains…
Much of the current work on reinforcement learning studies episodic settings, where the agent is reset between trials to an initial state distribution, often with well-shaped reward functions. Non-episodic settings, where the agent must…
Potential-based reward shaping provides an approach for designing good reward functions, with the purpose of speeding up learning. However, automatically finding potential functions for complex environments is a difficult problem (in fact,…
Crowd simulation is important for video-games design, since it enables to populate virtual worlds with autonomous avatars that navigate in a human-like manner. Reinforcement learning has shown great potential in simulating virtual crowds,…