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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

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…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2019-11-05 Nicholas Waytowich , Sean L. Barton , Vernon Lawhern , Garrett Warnell

Sparse and delayed reward functions pose a significant obstacle for real-world Reinforcement Learning (RL) applications. In this work, we propose Attention-based REward Shaping (ARES), a general and robust algorithm which uses a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-19 Ian Holmes , Min Chi

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has progressed from simple control tasks to complex real-world challenges with large state spaces. While RL excels in these tasks, training time remains a limitation. Reward shaping is a popular solution, but…

Successfully navigating a complex environment to obtain a desired outcome is a difficult task, that up to recently was believed to be capable only by humans. This perception has been broken down over time, especially with the introduction…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-12 Joshua Hare

Meta-reinforcement learning (meta-RL) has proven to be a successful framework for leveraging experience from prior tasks to rapidly learn new related tasks, however, current meta-RL approaches struggle to learn in sparse reward…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-12-03 Charles Packer , Pieter Abbeel , Joseph E. Gonzalez

Learning about many things can provide numerous benefits to a reinforcement learning system. For example, learning many auxiliary value functions, in addition to optimizing the environmental reward, appears to improve both exploration and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-25 Cam Linke , Nadia M. Ady , Martha White , Thomas Degris , Adam White

Specifying reward functions for complex tasks like object manipulation or driving is challenging to do by hand. Reward learning seeks to address this by learning a reward model using human feedback on selected query policies. This shifts…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-27 Kush Bhatia , Wenshuo Guo , Jacob Steinhardt

Teaching agents to follow complex written instructions has been an important yet elusive goal. One technique for enhancing learning efficiency is language reward shaping (LRS). Within a reinforcement learning (RL) framework, LRS involves…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-08-21 Sukai Huang , Nir Lipovetzky , Trevor Cohn

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

Deep reinforcement learning excels in continuous control but often requires extensive exploration, while physics-based models demand complete equations and suffer cubic complexity. This study proposes Hybrid Energy-Aware Reward Shaping…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Qijun Liao , Jue Yang , Yiting Kang , Xinxin Zhao , Yong Zhang , Mingan Zhao

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

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

In reinforcement learning (RL), the ability to utilize prior knowledge from previously solved tasks can allow agents to quickly solve new problems. In some cases, these new problems may be approximately solved by composing the solutions of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-02 Jacob Adamczyk , Argenis Arriojas , Stas Tiomkin , Rahul V. Kulkarni

This paper reviews exploration techniques in deep reinforcement learning. Exploration techniques are of primary importance when solving sparse reward problems. In sparse reward problems, the reward is rare, which means that the agent will…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-03 Pawel Ladosz , Lilian Weng , Minwoo Kim , Hyondong Oh

Model-based reinforcement learning is a promising learning strategy for practical robotic applications due to its improved data-efficiency versus model-free counterparts. However, current state-of-the-art model-based methods rely on shaped…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-10 Robert McCarthy , Qiang Wang , Stephen J. Redmond

Sparse-reward domains are challenging for reinforcement learning algorithms since significant exploration is needed before encountering reward for the first time. Hierarchical reinforcement learning can facilitate exploration by reducing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-13 Lorenzo Steccanella , Simone Totaro , Damien Allonsius , Anders Jonsson

Rewards play a crucial role in reinforcement learning. To arrive at the desired policy, the design of a suitable reward function often requires significant domain expertise as well as trial-and-error. Here, we aim to minimize the effort…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-11-18 Zheng Wu , Wenzhao Lian , Vaibhav Unhelkar , Masayoshi Tomizuka , Stefan Schaal

Reinforcement Learning has emerged as a strong alternative to solve optimization tasks efficiently. The use of these algorithms highly depends on the feedback signals provided by the environment in charge of informing about how good (or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-01 Alain Andres , Esther Villar-Rodriguez , Javier Del Ser

Learning a reward function from demonstrations suffers from low sample-efficiency. Even with abundant data, current inverse reinforcement learning methods that focus on learning from a single environment can fail to handle slight changes in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-15 Thomas Kleine Buening , Victor Villin , Christos Dimitrakakis