Mitigating Cowardice for Reinforcement Learning Agents in Combat Scenarios
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A common approach in reinforcement learning (RL) is to give the agent a static reward for successfully completing the task or punishing it for failing. However, this approach leads to a behaviour similar to fear in combat scenarios. It learns a sub-optimal policy improving over time while retaining elements of cowardice in updating the policy. Cowardice can be avoided by removing static rewards given to the agent at the terminal state, but this lack of reward can negatively affect performance. This paper presents a novel approach to solve these issues by decaying this reward or punishment based on the agent’s performance at the terminal state and evaluates the proposed method across three separate games of varying levels of complexity—The Legend of Zelda, Megaman X, and M.U.G.E.N. All three games are based on combat scenarios where the goal is to defeat the opponent by reducing its health to zero. In all environments, the agents receiving decayed reward and punishment are more stable when training, achieve higher win rates, and require fewer actions per game than their statically rewarded counterparts.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".