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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…

This article surveys reinforcement learning approaches in social robotics. Reinforcement learning is a framework for decision-making problems in which an agent interacts through trial-and-error with its environment to discover an optimal…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-02-12 Neziha Akalin , Amy Loutfi

Reward engineering has long been a challenge in Reinforcement Learning (RL) research, as it often requires extensive human effort and iterative processes of trial-and-error to design effective reward functions. In this paper, we propose…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-06-18 Yufei Wang , Zhanyi Sun , Jesse Zhang , Zhou Xian , Erdem Biyik , David Held , Zackory Erickson

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has been widely applied to many control tasks and substantially improved the performances compared to conventional control methods in many domains where the reward function is well defined. However, for many…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-22 Baohe Zhang , Yuan Zhang , Lilli Frison , Thomas Brox , Joschka Bödecker

In human-in-the-loop reinforcement learning or environments where calculating a reward is expensive, the costly rewards can make learning efficiency challenging to achieve. The cost of obtaining feedback from humans or calculating expensive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-03 Muhammed Yusuf Satici , David L. Roberts

Reinforcement learning (RL), while powerful and expressive, can often prioritize performance at the expense of safety. Yet safety violations can lead to catastrophic outcomes in real-world deployments. Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) offer…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-03-19 Lizhi Yang , Blake Werner , Massimiliano de Sa , Aaron D. Ames

In this work, we present the design, development, and experimental validation of a custom-built quadruped robot, Ask1. The Ask1 robot shares similar morphology with the Unitree Go1, but features custom hardware components and a different…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-09-09 Yang Zhang , Yuxing Lu , Guiyang Xin , Yufei Xue , Chenkun Qi , Kairong Qin , Yan Zhuang

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has shown great potential in refining robotic manipulation policies, yet its efficacy remains strongly bottlenecked by the difficulty of designing generalizable reward functions. In this paper, we propose a…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Yanru Wu , Weiduo Yuan , Ang Qi , Vitor Guizilini , Jiageng Mao , Yue Wang

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

Multimodal Reward Models (MRMs) play a crucial role in enhancing the performance of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). While recent advancements have primarily focused on improving the model structure and training data of MRMs, there…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-05-12 Yi-Fan Zhang , Xingyu Lu , Xiao Hu , Chaoyou Fu , Bin Wen , Tianke Zhang , Changyi Liu , Kaiyu Jiang , Kaibing Chen , Kaiyu Tang , Haojie Ding , Jiankang Chen , Fan Yang , Zhang Zhang , Tingting Gao , Liang Wang

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a general framework concerned with an agent that seeks to maximize rewards in an environment. The learning typically happens through trial and error using explorative methods, such as epsilon-greedy. There are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-06 Per-Arne Andersen , Morten Goodwin , Ole-Christoffer Granmo

Designing reward functions for efficiently guiding reinforcement learning (RL) agents toward specific behaviors is a complex task. This is challenging since it requires the identification of reward structures that are not sparse and that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-01 Dhawal Gupta , Yash Chandak , Scott M. Jordan , Philip S. Thomas , Bruno Castro da Silva

The sequential nature of decision-making in financial asset trading aligns naturally with the reinforcement learning (RL) framework, making RL a common approach in this domain. However, the low signal-to-noise ratio in financial markets…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-14 Sven Goluža , Tomislav Kovačević , Stjepan Begušić , Zvonko Kostanjčar

Reward design is a fundamental problem in reinforcement learning (RL). A misspecified or poorly designed reward can result in low sample efficiency and undesired behaviors. In this paper, we propose the idea of programmatic reward design,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-10 Weichao Zhou , Wenchao Li

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-10 Hlynur Davíð Hlynsson , Laurenz Wiskott

Deep reinforcement learning approaches have been a popular method for visual navigation tasks in the computer vision and robotics community of late. In most cases, the reward function has a binary structure, i.e., a large positive reward is…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-07-19 Srirangan Madhavan , Anwesan Pal , Henrik I. Christensen

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-16 Mark A. Rucker , Layne T. Watson , Matthew S. Gerber , Laura E. Barnes

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a promising approach for solving robotic manipulation tasks. However, it is challenging to apply the RL algorithms directly in the real world. For one thing, RL is data-intensive and typically requires…

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have recently advanced robotic manipulation by leveraging vision for scene perception and language for instruction following. However, existing methods rely heavily on costly human-annotated training…

In recent years, reinforcement learning (RL) has shown great potential for solving tasks in well-defined environments like games or robotics. This paper aims to solve the robotic reaching task in a simulation run on the Neurorobotics…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-05-21 Marton Szep , Leander Lauenburg , Kevin Farkas , Xiyan Su , Chuanlong Zang