English
Related papers

Related papers: Action-Dependent Optimality-Preserving Reward Shap…

200 papers

Reinforcement learning methods require careful design involving a reward function to obtain the desired action policy for a given task. In the absence of hand-crafted reward functions, prior work on the topic has proposed several methods…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-10-16 Daiki Kimura , Subhajit Chaudhury , Ryuki Tachibana , Sakyasingha Dasgupta

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-03 Roberta Raileanu , Tim Rocktäschel

Sparse reward environments are known to be challenging for reinforcement learning agents. In such environments, efficient and scalable exploration is crucial. Exploration is a means by which an agent gains information about the environment.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-11 Jacob Chmura , Hasham Burhani , Xiao Qi Shi

Developing an agent capable of adapting to unseen environments remains a difficult challenge in imitation learning. This work presents Adaptive Return-conditioned Policy (ARP), an efficient framework designed to enhance the agent's…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-26 Changyeon Kim , Younggyo Seo , Hao Liu , Lisa Lee , Jinwoo Shin , Honglak Lee , Kimin Lee

Learning to produce efficient movement behaviour for humanoid robots from scratch is a hard problem, as has been illustrated by the "Learning to run" competition at NIPS 2017. The goal of this competition was to train a two-legged model of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-17 Aleksandra Malysheva , Daniel Kudenko , Aleksei Shpilman

Autonomous agents optimize the reward function we give them. What they don't know is how hard it is for us to design a reward function that actually captures what we want. When designing the reward, we might think of some specific training…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-10-08 Dylan Hadfield-Menell , Smitha Milli , Pieter Abbeel , Stuart Russell , Anca Dragan

Deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) is proven powerful for decision making in simulated environments. However, training deep RL model is challenging in real world applications such as production-scale health-care or recommender systems because…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-14 Ge Liu , Rui Wu , Heng-Tze Cheng , Jing Wang , Jayden Ooi , Lihong Li , Ang Li , Wai Lok Sibon Li , Craig Boutilier , Ed Chi

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

Self-evaluation, a model's ability to assess the correctness of its own output, is crucial for Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) to achieve self-improvement in multi-turn conversations, yet largely absent in foundation models. Recent work has…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-14 Wenkai Wang , Hongcan Guo , Zheqi Lv , Shengyu Zhang

In reinforcement learning, reward shaping is an efficient way to guide the learning process of an agent, as the reward can indicate the optimal policy of the task. The potential-based reward shaping framework was proposed to guarantee…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-02-08 Yifei Chen , Lambert Schomaker , Francisco Cruz

Reward design is a critical part of the application of reinforcement learning, the performance of which strongly depends on how well the reward signal frames the goal of the designer and how well the signal assesses progress in reaching…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-01 Yixiang Wang , Yujing Hu , Feng Wu , Yingfeng Chen

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

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-18 Wenyun Li , Wenjie Huang , Chen Sun

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-30 Minjae Cho , Huy Trong Tran

Maximum entropy reinforcement learning motivates agents to explore states and actions to maximize the entropy of some distribution, typically by providing additional intrinsic rewards proportional to that entropy function. In this paper, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-20 Adrien Bolland , Gaspard Lambrechts , Damien Ernst

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

Reinforcement learning provides an automated framework for learning behaviors from high-level reward specifications, but in practice the choice of reward function can be crucial for good results -- while in principle the reward only needs…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-19 Abhishek Gupta , Aldo Pacchiano , Yuexiang Zhai , Sham M. Kakade , Sergey Levine

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…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-07-29 Leonardo Villalobos-Arias , Grant Forbes , Jianxun Wang , David L Roberts , Arnav Jhala

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

Human coordination often relies on the ability to influence the beliefs of others through strategic action. In multi-agent reinforcement learning, opponent shaping attempts to replicate this influence, though existing methods typically…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Aarav G Sane , Karthik Sivachandran , Rohan Paleja