Related papers: Potential-Based Reward Shaping For Intrinsic Motiv…
Recently there has been a proliferation of intrinsic motivation (IM) reward-shaping methods to learn in complex and sparse-reward environments. These methods can often inadvertently change the set of optimal policies in an environment,…
Recent RL research has utilized reward shaping--particularly complex shaping rewards such as intrinsic motivation (IM)--to encourage agent exploration in sparse-reward environments. While often effective, ``reward hacking'' can lead to the…
Intrinsic motivation and reward shaping guide reinforcement learning (RL) agents by adding pseudo-rewards, which can lead to useful emergent behaviors. However, they can also encourage counterproductive exploits, e.g., fixation with noisy…
Potential-based reward shaping is commonly used to incorporate prior knowledge of how to solve the task into reinforcement learning because it can formally guarantee policy invariance. As such, the optimal policy and the ordering of…
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,…
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…
Games are challenging for Reinforcement Learning~(RL) agents due to their reward-sparsity, as rewards are only obtainable after long sequences of deliberate actions. Intrinsic Motivation~(IM) methods -- which introduce exploration rewards…
This paper investigates two fundamental problems that arise when utilizing Intrinsic Motivation (IM) for reinforcement learning in Reward-Free Pre-Training (RFPT) tasks and Exploration with Intrinsic Motivation (EIM) tasks: 1) how to design…
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…
Potential-based reward shaping (PBRS) is an effective and popular technique to speed up reinforcement learning by leveraging domain knowledge. While PBRS is proven to always preserve optimal policies, its effect on learning speed is…
Exploration in sparse reward environments remains one of the key challenges of model-free reinforcement learning. Instead of solely relying on extrinsic rewards provided by the environment, many state-of-the-art methods use intrinsic…
Intrinsic motivation is a promising exploration technique for solving reinforcement learning tasks with sparse or absent extrinsic rewards. There exist two technical challenges in implementing intrinsic motivation: 1) how to design a proper…
Reinforcement learning is a powerful learning paradigm in which agents can learn to maximize sparse and delayed reward signals. Although RL has had many impressive successes in complex domains, learning can take hours, days, or even years…
Reinforcement learning, which acquires a policy maximizing long-term rewards, has been actively studied. Unfortunately, this learning type is too slow and difficult to use in practical situations because the state-action space becomes huge…
It is of significance for an agent to learn a widely applicable and general-purpose policy that can achieve diverse goals including images and text descriptions. Considering such perceptually-specific goals, the frontier of deep…
In the last few years, the research activity around reinforcement learning tasks formulated over environments with sparse rewards has been especially notable. Among the numerous approaches proposed to deal with these hard exploration…
The automatic synthesis of policies for robotic-control tasks through reinforcement learning relies on a reward signal that simultaneously captures many possibly conflicting requirements. In this paper, we in\-tro\-duce a novel,…
Preference-based Reinforcement Learning (PbRL) provides a way to learn high-performance policies in environments where the reward signal is hard to specify, avoiding heuristic and time-consuming reward design. However, PbRL can suffer from…
Exploration is essential in reinforcement learning as an agent relies on trial and error to learn an optimal policy. However, when rewards are sparse, naive exploration strategies, like noise injection, are often insufficient. Intrinsic…
Exploration in complex domains is a key challenge in reinforcement learning, especially for tasks with very sparse rewards. Recent successes in deep reinforcement learning have been achieved mostly using simple heuristic exploration…