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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,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-04 Luigi Berducci , Edgar A. Aguilar , Dejan Ničković , Radu Grosu

Learning high-performance control policies that remain consistent with expert behavior is a fundamental challenge in robotics. Reinforcement learning can discover high-performing strategies but often departs from desirable human behavior,…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-04-06 Siwei Ju , Jan Tauberschmidt , Oleg Arenz , Peter van Vliet , Jan Peters

Many continuous control tasks have easily formulated objectives, yet using them directly as a reward in reinforcement learning (RL) leads to suboptimal policies. Therefore, many classical control tasks guide RL training using complex…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-21 Aleksandra Faust , Anthony Francis , Dar Mehta

Finding meaningful and accurate dense rewards is a fundamental task in the field of reinforcement learning (RL) that enables agents to explore environments more efficiently. In traditional RL settings, agents learn optimal policies through…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-05 Shuyuan Zhang

Reinforcement learning (RL) has shown to be a valuable tool in training neural networks for autonomous motion planning. The application of RL to a specific problem is dependent on a reward signal to quantify how good or bad a certain action…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-10-28 Benjamin Evans , Herman A. Engelbrecht , Hendrik W. Jordaan

Designing reward functions for efficiently guiding reinforcement learning (RL) agents toward specific behaviors is a complex task. This is challenging since it requires the identification of reward structures that are not sparse and that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-01 Dhawal Gupta , Yash Chandak , Scott M. Jordan , Philip S. Thomas , Bruno Castro da Silva

Reinforcement learning (RL) methods usually treat reward functions as black boxes. As such, these methods must extensively interact with the environment in order to discover rewards and optimal policies. In most RL applications, however,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-19 Rodrigo Toro Icarte , Toryn Q. Klassen , Richard Valenzano , Sheila A. McIlraith

There has been significant progress in deep reinforcement learning (RL) in recent years. Nevertheless, finding suitable hyperparameter configurations and reward functions remains challenging even for experts, and performance heavily relies…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-10 Julian Dierkes , Emma Cramer , Holger H. Hoos , Sebastian Trimpe

Deep reinforcement learning has proven remarkably useful in training agents from unstructured data. However, the opacity of the produced agents makes it difficult to ensure that they adhere to various requirements posed by human engineers.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-10 Raz Yerushalmi , Guy Amir , Achiya Elyasaf , David Harel , Guy Katz , Assaf Marron

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-18 Hongyu Ding , Yuanze Tang , Qing Wu , Bo Wang , Chunlin Chen , Zhi Wang

Model-based reinforcement learning techniques accelerate the learning task by employing a transition model to make predictions. In this paper, a model-based learning approach is presented that iteratively computes the optimal value function…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-10-22 Milad Farsi , Jun Liu

While reinforcement learning (RL) has the potential to enable robots to autonomously acquire a wide range of skills, in practice, RL usually requires manual, per-task engineering of reward functions, especially in real world settings where…

Robotics · Computer Science 2019-02-15 Tianhe Yu , Gleb Shevchuk , Dorsa Sadigh , Chelsea Finn

Recently, there has been a surge of interest in analyzing the non-asymptotic behavior of model-free reinforcement learning algorithms. However, the performance of such algorithms in non-ideal environments, such as in the presence of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-06 Sreejeet Maity , Aritra Mitra

Constrained reinforcement learning is to maximize the expected reward subject to constraints on utilities/costs. However, the training environment may not be the same as the test one, due to, e.g., modeling error, adversarial attack,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-16 Yue Wang , Fei Miao , Shaofeng Zou

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

Preference-based reward learning is widely used for shaping agent behavior to match a user's preference, yet its sparse binary feedback makes it especially vulnerable to causal confusion. The learned reward often latches onto spurious…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-06 Minjune Hwang , Yigit Korkmaz , Daniel Seita , Erdem Bıyık

One obstacle to applying reinforcement learning algorithms to real-world problems is the lack of suitable reward functions. Designing such reward functions is difficult in part because the user only has an implicit understanding of the task…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-11-20 Jan Leike , David Krueger , Tom Everitt , Miljan Martic , Vishal Maini , Shane Legg

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-25 Aly Lidayan , Michael Dennis , Stuart Russell

We focus on an unloading problem, typical of the logistics sector, modeled as a sequential pick-and-place task. In this type of task, modern machine learning techniques have shown to work better than classic systems since they are more…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-05-30 Vittorio Giammarino , Andrew J Meyer , Kai Biegun

This paper develops an inverse reinforcement learning algorithm aimed at recovering a reward function from the observed actions of an agent. We introduce a strategy to flexibly handle different types of actions with two approximations of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-07-26 Kun Li , Yanan Sui , Joel W. Burdick