English
Related papers

Related papers: Attention-Based Reward Shaping for Sparse and Dela…

200 papers

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…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-07-15 Ingmar Schubert , Ozgur S. Oguz , Marc Toussaint

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

Recent reinforcement learning (RL) approaches have shown strong performance in complex domains such as Atari games, but are often highly sample inefficient. A common approach to reduce interaction time with the environment is to use reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-03 Prasoon Goyal , Scott Niekum , Raymond J. Mooney

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) presents an attractive paradigm for training intelligent agents without expensive online interactions. However, current approaches still struggle with complex, long-horizon sequential decision making. In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-10 Changyeon Kim , Haeone Lee , Younggyo Seo , Kimin Lee , Yuke Zhu

Chain-of-thought reasoning enables large language models to solve multi-step tasks by framing problem solving as sequential decision problems. Outcome-based rewards, which provide feedback only on final answers, show impressive success, but…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-15 Tarun Chitra

This paper introduces a new imitation learning framework based on energy-based generative models capable of learning complex, physics-dependent, robot motion policies through state-only expert motion trajectories. Our algorithm, called…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-02-13 Anish Abhijit Diwan , Julen Urain , Jens Kober , Jan Peters

Long-term temporal credit assignment is an important challenge in deep reinforcement learning (RL). It refers to the ability of the agent to attribute actions to consequences that may occur after a long time interval. Existing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-27 Tanmay Gangwani , Yuan Zhou , Jian Peng

Reinforcement learning (RL) holds significant promise for training LLM agents to handle complex, goal-oriented tasks that require multi-step interactions with external environments. However, a critical challenge when applying RL to these…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-28 Hanlin Wang , Chak Tou Leong , Jiashuo Wang , Jian Wang , Wenjie Li

Aligning large language models with human objectives is paramount, yet common approaches including RLHF suffer from unstable and resource-intensive training. In response to this challenge, we introduce ARGS, Alignment as Reward-Guided…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-06 Maxim Khanov , Jirayu Burapacheep , Yixuan Li

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.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-12 Giuseppe Canonaco , Leo Ardon , Alberto Pozanco , Daniel Borrajo

Much of the current work on reinforcement learning studies episodic settings, where the agent is reset between trials to an initial state distribution, often with well-shaped reward functions. Non-episodic settings, where the agent must…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-23 John D. Co-Reyes , Suvansh Sanjeev , Glen Berseth , Abhishek Gupta , Sergey Levine

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

Reinforcement learning has been successful in training autonomous agents to accomplish goals in complex environments. Although this has been adapted to multiple settings, including robotics and computer games, human players often find it…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-01-22 Baicen Xiao , Qifan Lu , Bhaskar Ramasubramanian , Andrew Clark , Linda Bushnell , Radha Poovendran

Reward design remains a critical bottleneck in visual reinforcement learning (RL) for robotic manipulation. In simulated environments, rewards are conventionally designed based on the distance to a target position. However, such precise…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-29 Nan Tang , Jing-Cheng Pang , Guanlin Li , Chao Qian , Yang Yu

As machine learning models become more capable, they have exhibited increased potential in solving complex tasks. One of the most promising directions uses deep reinforcement learning to train autonomous agents in computer network defense…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-23 Elizabeth Bates , Vasilios Mavroudis , Chris Hicks

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-12 Mateo Juliani , Mingxuan Li , Elias Bareinboim

First-person object-interaction tasks in high-fidelity, 3D, simulated environments such as the AI2Thor virtual home-environment pose significant sample-efficiency challenges for reinforcement learning (RL) agents learning from sparse task…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-31 Wilka Carvalho , Anthony Liang , Kimin Lee , Sungryull Sohn , Honglak Lee , Richard L. Lewis , Satinder Singh

Artificial Intelligence has been used to help human complete difficult tasks in complicated environments by providing optimized strategies for decision-making or replacing the manual labour. In environments including multiple agents, such…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-24 Chaoyi Gu , Varuna De Silva , Corentin Artaud , Rafael Pina

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

Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents have demonstrated their potential across various robotic tasks. However, they still heavily rely on human-engineered reward functions, requiring extensive trial-and-error and access to target behavior…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-03-03 Changyeon Kim , Minho Heo , Doohyun Lee , Jinwoo Shin , Honglak Lee , Joseph J. Lim , Kimin Lee