← 研踪 PaperTrailarXiv:2611.02415 · v1
Behavior-Discriminative Reward Shaping for Reward-Robust Reinforcement Learning
首次提交 2026-11-02 10:39
版本更新 2026-11-02 10:39
雷达观测 2026-11-04 23:42
摘要
Reward-robust RL typically models misspecification by specifying an uncertainty set that constrains the discrepancy of plausible rewards from a base reward. However, such reward space discrepancies can be behaviorally irrelevant: under potential-based reward shaping (PBRS), many distinct rewards preserve policy ordering. This can introduce substantial redundancy into standard uncertainty sets and degrade optimization performance. We propose Shaping-Aware Reward-Robust RL, which constructs uncertainty sets over PBRS equivalence classes by projecting each reward to a canonical representative, ensuring that the resulting set contains only rewards that induce behaviorally distinct policy rankings. We prove that this projection preserves the optimal robust value while shrinking the uncertainty set and improving empirical performance. Using the connection between robustness and regularization, we obtain a practical algorithm to solve the shaping-aware reward-robust RL problem and enjoy convergence guarantees under standard assumptions. Experiments on benchmarks spanning diverse task domains and levels of complexity show consistent improvements over representative robust RL baselines and exhibit improved robustness to reward perturbations.
作者备注：Neurips 2026
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v1 · 2026-11-02 10:39 · 最新观测版本
Behavior-Discriminative Reward Shaping for Reward-Robust Reinforcement Learning
Reward-robust RL typically models misspecification by specifying an uncertainty set that constrains the discrepancy of plausible rewards from a base reward. However, such reward space discrepancies can be behaviorally irrelevant: under potential-based reward shaping (PBRS), many distinct rewards preserve policy ordering. This can introduce substantial redundancy into standard uncertainty sets and degrade optimization performance. We propose Shaping-Aware Reward-Robust RL, which constructs uncertainty sets over PBRS equivalence classes by projecting each reward to a canonical representative, ensuring that the resulting set contains only rewards that induce behaviorally distinct policy rankings. We prove that this projection preserves the optimal robust value while shrinking the uncertainty set and improving empirical performance. Using the connection between robustness and regularization, we obtain a practical algorithm to solve the shaping-aware reward-robust RL problem and enjoy convergence guarantees under standard assumptions. Experiments on benchmarks spanning diverse task domains and levels of complexity show consistent improvements over representative robust RL baselines and exhibit improved robustness to reward perturbations.
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