Related papers: Bootstrapped Reward Shaping
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…
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 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…
In high-dimensional state spaces, the usefulness of Reinforcement Learning (RL) is limited by the problem of exploration. This issue has been addressed using potential-based reward shaping (PB-RS) previously. In the present work, we…
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,…
The use of Potential-Based Reward Shaping (PBRS) has shown great promise in the ongoing research effort to tackle sample inefficiency in Reinforcement Learning (RL). However, choosing the right potential function remains an open challenge.…
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…
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…
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…
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,…
Reinforcement learning (RL) has successfully automated the complex process of mining formulaic alpha factors, for creating interpretable and profitable investment strategies. However, existing methods are hampered by the sparse 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…
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…
Reward shaping has been applied widely to accelerate Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents' training. However, a principled way of designing effective reward shaping functions, especially for complex continuous control problems, remains…
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…
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…
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…
In many real-world scenarios, reward signal for agents are exceedingly sparse, making it challenging to learn an effective reward function for reward shaping. To address this issue, the proposed approach in this paper performs reward…
Reward shaping is a technique in reinforcement learning that addresses the sparse-reward problem by providing more frequent and informative rewards. We introduce a self-adaptive and highly efficient reward shaping mechanism that…
In continuing tasks, average-reward reinforcement learning may be a more appropriate problem formulation than the more common discounted reward formulation. As usual, learning an optimal policy in this setting typically requires a large…