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While deep reinforcement learning techniques have led to agents that are successfully able to learn to perform a number of tasks that had been previously unlearnable, these techniques are still susceptible to the longstanding problem of…

Multimedia · Computer Science 2019-06-07 Nicholas Waytowich , Sean L. Barton , Vernon Lawhern , Ethan Stump , Garrett Warnell

Reinforcement learning algorithms describe how an agent can learn an optimal action policy in a sequential decision process, through repeated experience. In a given environment, the agent policy provides him some running and terminal…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2020-03-24 Arthur Charpentier , Romuald Elie , Carl Remlinger

Potential-based reward shaping (PBRS) is a particular category of machine learning methods which aims to improve the learning speed of a reinforcement learning agent by extracting and utilizing extra knowledge while performing a task. There…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-03-15 Babak Badnava , Mona Esmaeili , Nasser Mozayani , Payman Zarkesh-Ha

In adversarial environments, one side could gain an advantage by identifying the opponent's strategy. For example, in combat games, if an opponents strategy is identified as overly aggressive, one could lay a trap that exploits the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-08-03 Mark Rucker , Stephen Adams , Roy Hayes , Peter A. Beling

Designing an effective reward function has long been a challenge in reinforcement learning, particularly for complex tasks in unstructured environments. To address this, various learning paradigms have emerged that leverage different forms…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-29 Muhammad Qasim Elahi , Somtochukwu Oguchienti , Maheed H. Ahmed , Mahsa Ghasemi

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

Reward shaping is critical in reinforcement learning (RL), particularly for complex tasks where sparse rewards can hinder learning. However, choosing effective shaping rewards from a set of reward functions in a computationally efficient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-26 Chen Bo Calvin Zhang , Zhang-Wei Hong , Aldo Pacchiano , Pulkit Agrawal

We investigate a class of reinforcement learning dynamics where players adjust their strategies based on their actions' cumulative payoffs over time - specifically, by playing mixed strategies that maximize their expected cumulative payoff…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2016-02-10 Panayotis Mertikopoulos , William H. Sandholm

Existing alignment methods directly use the reward model learned from user preference data to optimize an LLM policy, subject to KL regularization with respect to the base policy. This practice is suboptimal for maximizing user's utility…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Haichuan Wang , Tao Lin , Lingkai Kong , Ce Li , Hezi Jiang , Milind Tambe

We consider an online regression setting in which individuals adapt to the regression model: arriving individuals are aware of the current model, and invest strategically in modifying their own features so as to improve the predicted score…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-02 Yahav Bechavod , Katrina Ligett , Zhiwei Steven Wu , Juba Ziani

Learning a policy capable of moving an agent between any two states in the environment is important for many robotics problems involving navigation and manipulation. Due to the sparsity of rewards in such tasks, applying reinforcement…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-07-05 Artem Molchanov , Karol Hausman , Stan Birchfield , Gaurav Sukhatme

Q-shaping is an extension of Q-value initialization and serves as an alternative to reward shaping for incorporating domain knowledge to accelerate agent training, thereby improving sample efficiency by directly shaping Q-values. This…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-10-03 Xiefeng Wu

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

One major limitation to the applicability of Reinforcement Learning (RL) to many practical domains is the large number of samples required to learn an optimal policy. To address this problem and improve learning efficiency, we consider a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-07 Roberto Cipollone , Giuseppe De Giacomo , Marco Favorito , Luca Iocchi , Fabio Patrizi

Q-learning provides a standard reinforcement learning framework for studying cooperation by specifying how agents update action values from repeated local interactions outcomes. Although previous work has shown that reputation can promote…

Physics and Society · Physics 2026-02-03 Chunpeng Du , Zongyang Li , Yali Zhang , Yikang Lu , Attila Szolnoki

In reinforcement learning, especially in sparse-reward domains, many environment steps are required to observe reward information. In order to increase the frequency of such observations, "potential-based reward shaping" (PBRS) has been…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-28 Jacob Adamczyk , Volodymyr Makarenko , Stas Tiomkin , Rahul V. Kulkarni

The problem of reinforcement learning is considered where the environment or the model undergoes a change. An algorithm is proposed that an agent can apply in such a problem to achieve the optimal long-time discounted reward. The algorithm…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-04-25 Wuxia Chen , Taposh Banerjee , Jemin George , Carl Busart

In addressing control problems such as regulation and tracking through reinforcement learning, it is often required to guarantee that the acquired policy meets essential performance and stability criteria such as a desired settling time and…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-03-21 Francesco De Lellis , Marco Coraggio , Giovanni Russo , Mirco Musolesi , Mario di Bernardo

One of the central challenges faced by a reinforcement learning (RL) agent is to effectively learn a (near-)optimal policy in environments with large state spaces having sparse and noisy feedback signals. In real-world applications, an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-24 Parameswaran Kamalaruban , Rati Devidze , Volkan Cevher , Adish Singla

Deep learning has achieved remarkable successes in solving challenging reinforcement learning (RL) problems when dense reward function is provided. However, in sparse reward environment it still often suffers from the need to carefully…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-02-19 Hao Liu , Alexander Trott , Richard Socher , Caiming Xiong