A locally-built, LLM-digested index of recent arXiv papers in quant finance, geometry/topology, and statistical ML — keyword search served straight from SQLite on this machine.
This paper introduces a new reward shaping method for average-reward reinforcement learning.
Action guidance helps agents learn true objectives in games with sparse rewards.
Reward shaping is one of the most effective methods to tackle the crucial yet challenging problem of credit assignment in Reinforcement Learning (RL). However, designing shaping functions usually requires much expert knowledge and hand-engineering, and the difficulties are further exacerbated given multiple similar tas…
New star-shaped acceptability indexes generalize existing methods.
This work simplifies IRL by using potential-based reward shaping.
Self-supervised reward prediction improves RL in sparse reward settings.
A new method shapes reinforcement learning environments by abstracting large state spaces.
TLRS improves predictive power of mined formulaic alpha factors.
A new reward shaping method balances learning efficiency and effectiveness for robot manipulation.
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 shaping, which involves carefully designing reward functions that provide the ag…
A language for specifying complex reinforcement learning tasks.
While recent progress in deep reinforcement learning has enabled robots to learn complex behaviors, tasks with long horizons and sparse rewards remain an ongoing challenge. In this work, we propose an effective reward shaping method through predictive coding to tackle sparse reward problems. By learning predictive repr…
This paper explores how environmental properties can simplify reinforcement learning in non-episodic settings.
In spite of the success of existing meta reinforcement learning methods, they still have difficulty in learning a meta policy effectively for RL problems with sparse reward. In this respect, we develop a novel meta reinforcement learning framework called Hyper-Meta RL(HMRL), for sparse reward RL problems. It is consist…
SIBRE boosts reinforcement learning convergence by rewarding improvement over past performance.
WDAIL uses Wasserstein distance for more effective reward shaping in IL.
We propose a new complexity measure for Markov decision processes (MDPs), the maximum expected hitting cost (MEHC). This measure tightens the closely related notion of diameter [JOA10] by accounting for the reward structure. We show that this parameter replaces diameter in the upper bound on the optimal value span of a…
Reinforcement learning requires manual specification of a reward function to learn a task. While in principle this reward function only needs to specify the task goal, in practice reinforcement learning can be very time-consuming or even infeasible unless the reward function is shaped so as to provide a smooth gradient…
Study optimal reward schemes for inducing desired player performance in risky contests.
New RL approach infers optimal policies via variational inference.
This paper explores a simple regularizer for reinforcement learning by proposing Generative Adversarial Self-Imitation Learning (GASIL), which encourages the agent to imitate past good trajectories via generative adversarial imitation learning framework. Instead of directly maximizing rewards, GASIL focuses on reproduc…
Reinforcement learning usually uses the feedback rewards of environmental to train agents. But the rewards in the actual environment are sparse, and even some environments will not rewards. Most of the current methods are difficult to get good performance in sparse reward or non-reward environments. Although using shap…
Proposes a framework for energy-efficient AIGC workload scheduling in cloud data centers.
Many practical environments contain catastrophic states that an optimal agent would visit infrequently or never. Even on toy problems, Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) agents tend to periodically revisit these states upon forgetting their existence under a new policy. We introduce intrinsic fear (IF), a learned reward…
Improved reinforcement learning with deep learning.
Best-of-N sampling reveals reward targets from preference data, influencing N and base distribution choices.
RLVR training dynamics reveal an implicit curriculum that shapes learning progression.
We propose RUDDER, a novel reinforcement learning approach for delayed rewards in finite Markov decision processes (MDPs). In MDPs the Q-values are equal to the expected immediate reward plus the expected future rewards. The latter are related to bias problems in temporal difference (TD) learning and to high variance p…
Unified LP framework for offline reward learning from human demonstrations and feedback.
SARA uses similarity to learn rewards robustly and adaptively.
Many cooperative multiagent reinforcement learning environments provide agents with a sparse team-based reward, as well as a dense agent-specific reward that incentivizes learning basic skills. Training policies solely on the team-based reward is often difficult due to its sparsity. Furthermore, relying solely on the a…
Novelty search in low-dimensional space improves sample efficiency in exploration tasks.
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 for reward estimation by using expert state trajectories and action pairs. However…
The central tenet of reinforcement learning (RL) is that agents seek to maximize the sum of cumulative rewards. In contrast, active inference, an emerging framework within cognitive and computational neuroscience, proposes that agents act to maximize the evidence for a biased generative model. Here, we illustrate how i…
In this paper, we propose a framework that enables a human teacher to shape a robot behaviour by interactively providing it with unlabeled instructions. We ground the meaning of instruction signals in the task-learning process, and use them simultaneously for guiding the latter. We implement our framework as a modular …
Deep learning has achieved remarkable successes in solving challenging reinforcement learning (RL) problems when dense reward function is provided. However, in sparse reward environment it still often suffers from the need to carefully shape reward function to guide policy optimization. This limits the applicability of…
Exploration is widely regarded as one of the most challenging aspects of reinforcement learning (RL), with many naive approaches succumbing to exponential sample complexity. To isolate the challenges of exploration, we propose a new "reward-free RL" framework. In the exploration phase, the agent first collects trajecto…
Paper simplifies complex AI exploration by predicting future rewards.
Humans are spectacular reinforcement learners, constantly learning from and adjusting to experience and feedback. Unfortunately, this doesn't necessarily mean humans are fast learners. When tasks are challenging, learning can become unacceptably slow. Fortunately, humans do not have to learn tabula rasa, and learning s…
The success of popular algorithms for deep reinforcement learning, such as policy-gradients and Q-learning, relies heavily on the availability of an informative reward signal at each timestep of the sequential decision-making process. When rewards are only sparsely available during an episode, or a rewarding feedback i…
An agent learning through interactions should balance its action selection process between probing the environment to discover new rewards and using the information acquired in the past to adopt useful behaviour. This trade-off is usually obtained by perturbing either the agent's actions (e.g., e-greedy or Gibbs sampli…
LineFlow is a framework for training RL agents to control production lines.
In this paper we explore methods to exploit symmetries for ensuring sample efficiency in reinforcement learning (RL), this problem deserves ever increasing attention with the recent advances in the use of deep networks for complex RL tasks which require large amount of training data. We introduce a novel method to dete…
This paper augments the reward received by a reinforcement learning agent with potential functions in order to help the agent learn (possibly stochastic) optimal policies. We show that a potential-based reward shaping scheme is able to preserve optimality of stochastic policies, and demonstrate that the ability of an a…
Proposes Constrained Q-learning for reinforcement learning with constraints.
Mastering robotic manipulation skills through reinforcement learning (RL) typically requires the design of shaped reward functions. Recent developments in this area have demonstrated that using sparse rewards, i.e. rewarding the agent only when the task has been successfully completed, can lead to better policies. Howe…
Generative thermal design learns optimal shapes using multi-agent reinforcement learning.
Our understanding of reinforcement learning (RL) has been shaped by theoretical and empirical results that were obtained decades ago using tabular representations and linear function approximators. These results suggest that RL methods that use temporal differencing (TD) are superior to direct Monte Carlo estimation (M…