Related papers: Potential-Based Intrinsic Motivation: Preserving O…
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,…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Reward models are central to aligning language models with human preferences via reinforcement learning (RL). As RL is increasingly applied to settings such as verifiable rewards and multi-objective alignment, RMs are expected to encode…
While unsupervised skill discovery has shown promise in autonomously acquiring behavioral primitives, there is still a large methodological disconnect between task-agnostic skill pretraining and downstream, task-aware finetuning. We present…
Goal-conditioned reinforcement learning (RL) is an interesting extension of the traditional RL framework, where the dynamic environment and reward sparsity can cause conventional learning algorithms to fail. Reward shaping is a practical…
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…
Reward machines (RMs) provide a structured way to specify non-Markovian rewards in reinforcement learning (RL), thereby improving both expressiveness and programmability. Viewed more broadly, they separate what is known about the…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…