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Related papers: Bootstrapped Reward Shaping

200 papers

Multi-agent hierarchical reinforcement learning (MAHRL) has been studied as an effective means to solve intelligent decision problems in complex and large-scale environments. However, most current MAHRL algorithms follow the traditional way…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-11-05 Chanjuan Liu , Jinmiao Cong , Bingcai Chen , Yaochu Jin , Enqiang Zhu

In Reinforcement Learning (RL), it is commonly assumed that an immediate reward signal is generated for each action taken by the agent, helping the agent maximize cumulative rewards to obtain the optimal policy. However, in many real-world…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-29 Yuting Tang , Xin-Qiang Cai , Yao-Xiang Ding , Qiyu Wu , Guoqing Liu , Masashi Sugiyama

Preference-based Reinforcement Learning (PbRL) is a paradigm in which an RL agent learns to optimize a task using pair-wise preference-based feedback over trajectories, rather than explicit reward signals. While PbRL has demonstrated…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-18 Wenhao Zhan , Masatoshi Uehara , Wen Sun , Jason D. Lee

A well-defined reward function is crucial for successful training of an reinforcement learning (RL) agent. However, defining a suitable reward function is a notoriously challenging task, especially in complex, multi-objective environments.…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-08-31 Jasmina Gajcin , James McCarthy , Rahul Nair , Radu Marinescu , Elizabeth Daly , Ivana Dusparic

Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms suffer from the dependency on accurately engineered reward functions to properly guide the learning agents to do the required tasks. Preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL) addresses that by…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-08-23 Youssef Abdelkareem , Shady Shehata , Fakhri Karray

Preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL) has emerged as a promising approach for learning behaviors from human feedback without predefined reward functions. However, current PbRL methods face a critical challenge in effectively…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-06-17 Brahim Driss , Alex Davey , Riad Akrour

We investigate the effect of reward shaping in improving the performance of reinforcement learning in the context of the real-time strategy, capture-the-flag game. The game is characterized by sparse rewards that are associated with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-29 John Kliem , Prithviraj Dasgupta

Preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL) is an approach that enables RL agents to learn from preference, which is particularly useful when formulating a reward function is challenging. Existing PbRL methods generally involve a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-30 Gaon An , Junhyeok Lee , Xingdong Zuo , Norio Kosaka , Kyung-Min Kim , Hyun Oh Song

Reinforcement Learning from Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) suffers from exploration inefficiency, where models struggle to generate successful rollouts, resulting in minimal learning signal. This challenge is particularly severe for tasks that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-20 Saaket Agashe , Jayanth Srinivasa , Gaowen Liu , Ramana Kompella , Xin Eric Wang

The aim of Reinforcement Learning (RL) in real-world applications is to create systems capable of making autonomous decisions by learning from their environment through trial and error. This paper emphasizes the importance of reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-31 Sinan Ibrahim , Mostafa Mostafa , Ali Jnadi , Hadi Salloum , Pavel Osinenko

Large Language Models (LLMs) empowered with Tool-Integrated Reasoning (TIR) can iteratively plan, call external tools, and integrate returned information to solve complex, long-horizon reasoning tasks. Agentic Reinforcement Learning…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-21 Jianghao Su , Xia Zeng , Luhui Liu , Chao Luo , Ye Chen , Zhuoran Zhuang

Recent studies have shown that reinforcement learning (RL) models are vulnerable in various noisy scenarios. For instance, the observed reward channel is often subject to noise in practice (e.g., when rewards are collected through sensors),…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-04 Jingkang Wang , Yang Liu , Bo Li

Multi-agent reinforcement learning involves multiple agents interacting with each other and a shared environment to complete tasks. When rewards provided by the environment are sparse, agents may not receive immediate feedback on the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-31 Baicen Xiao , Bhaskar Ramasubramanian , Radha Poovendran

Search-augmented large language models (LLMs) trained with reinforcement learning (RL) have achieved strong results on open-domain question answering (QA), but training still remains a significant challenge. The optimization is often…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-25 Yutao Xie , Nathaniel Thomas , Nicklas Hansen , Yang Fu , Li Erran Li , Xiaolong Wang

We introduce Random Reward Perturbation (RRP), a novel exploration strategy for reinforcement learning (RL). Our theoretical analyses demonstrate that adding zero-mean noise to environmental rewards effectively enhances policy diversity…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-11 Haozhe Ma , Guoji Fu , Zhengding Luo , Jiele Wu , Tze-Yun Leong

We consider the problem of reinforcement learning under safety requirements, in which an agent is trained to complete a given task, typically formalized as the maximization of a reward signal over time, while concurrently avoiding…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-09-25 Tu-Hoa Pham , Giovanni De Magistris , Don Joven Agravante , Subhajit Chaudhury , Asim Munawar , Ryuki Tachibana

In reinforcement learning (RL), agents continually interact with the environment and use the feedback to refine their behavior. To guide policy optimization, reward models are introduced as proxies of the desired objectives, such that when…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-19 Rui Yu , Shenghua Wan , Yucen Wang , Chen-Xiao Gao , Le Gan , Zongzhang Zhang , De-Chuan Zhan

Designing effective reward functions remains a central challenge in reinforcement learning, especially in multi-objective environments. In this work, we propose Multi-Objective Reward Shaping with Exploration (MORSE), a general framework…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-18 Yuqing Xie , Jiayu Chen , Wenhao Tang , Ya Zhang , Chao Yu , Yu Wang

Shaping has proven to be a powerful but precarious means of improving reinforcement learning performance. Ng, Harada, and Russell (1999) proposed the potential-based shaping algorithm for adding shaping rewards in a way that guarantees the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2011-06-28 E. Wiewiora

Learning a good representation is an essential component for deep reinforcement learning (RL). Representation learning is especially important in multitask and partially observable settings where building a representation of the unknown…