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Record W4417239585 · doi:10.1038/s41467-025-66009-y

Discovery of the reward function for embodied reinforcement learning agents

2025· article· en· W4417239585 on OpenAlexaff
Renzhi Lu, Zonghe Shao, Yuemin Ding, Ruijuan Chen, Dongrui Wu, Housheng Su, Tao Yang, Fumin Zhang, Jun Wang, Yang Shi, Zhong‐Ping Jiang, Ding Han, Haitao Zhang

Bibliographic record

VenueNature Communications · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldComputer Science
TopicReinforcement Learning in Robotics
Canadian institutionsUniversity of Victoria
FundersNational Key Research and Development Program of ChinaState Key Laboratory of Industrial Control TechnologyState Key Laboratory of Mechanical TransmissionsHuazhong University of Science and TechnologyNational Natural Science Foundation of China
KeywordsEmbodied cognitionReinforcement learningRegretMaximizationAdaptabilityCognitionFunction (biology)Cognitive robotics

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Reward maximization is a fundamental principle in both the survival and evolution of biological organisms. In particular, in the contexts of cognitive science and embodied agents, reward-driven behavior has been widely regarded as important in terms of governing complex cognitive abilities such as perception, imitation, and learning. Among the frameworks that are aimed at establishing such abilities, reinforcement learning (RL), which leverages reward maximization to facilitate intelligent decision-making in embodied agents, has been proven to be particularly promising. Importantly, the inherent complexity and uncertainty of real-world tasks pose significant challenges when designing effective reward functions for embodied RL agents. Conventional methods typically rely on manually engineered or externally tuned reward signals, and therefore require significant domain expertise, associated with considerable human efforts and a long convergence time; these issues may even trigger mission failure. This work introduces a bilevel optimization framework that discovers optimal reward functions for embodied reinforcement learning agents through a mechanism called regret minimization. The approach accelerates policy optimization and enhances adaptability across diverse tasks. These findings can support the broader adoption of embodied RL agents in the behavioral and computational sciences and neurosciences, thereby paving the way for artificial general intelligence.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.001
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Simulation or modeling · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Methods · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.978
Threshold uncertainty score0.503

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.001
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.001
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0030.001
Research integrity0.0000.001
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.025
GPT teacher head0.306
Teacher spread0.281 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designSimulation or modeling
Domainnot available
GenreMethods

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".

Quick stats

Citations3
Published2025
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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