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 to specify what the task is, in reality practitioners often need to design more detailed rewards that provide the agent with some hints about how the task should be completed. The idea of this type of ``reward-shaping'' has been often discussed in the literature, and is often a critical part of practical applications, but there is relatively little formal characterization of how the choice of reward shaping can yield benefits in sample complexity. In this work, we build on the framework of novelty-based exploration to provide a simple scheme for incorporating shaped rewards into RL along with an analysis tool to show that particular choices of reward shaping provably improve sample efficiency. We characterize the class of problems where these gains are expected to be significant and show how this can be connected to practical algorithms in the literature. We confirm that these results hold in practice in an experimental evaluation, providing an insight into the mechanisms through which reward shaping can significantly improve the complexity of reinforcement learning while retaining asymptotic performance.

本文阐述了在强化学习中选择适当的奖励设计方法对提高学习效率的重要性，并提出了一种将奖励设计融入强化学习框架的方案，并通过基于奖励设计所得到的样本效率的提高，证明了该方案在实践中的有效性。

解析奖励塑造：理解奖励工程对样本复杂性的益处