{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/on-the-importance-of-reward-design-in","title":"On the Importance of Reward Design in Reinforcement Learning-based Dynamic Algorithm Configuration: A Case Study on OneMax with (1+($λ$,$λ$))-GA","arxiv_id":"2502.20265","date":"2025-02-27","proceeding":null,"authors":["Tai Nguyen","Phong Le","André Biedenkapp","Carola Doerr","Nguyen Dang"],"abstract":"Dynamic Algorithm Configuration (DAC) has garnered significant attention in recent years, particularly in the prevalence of machine learning and deep learning algorithms. Numerous studies have leveraged the robustness of decision-making in Reinforcement Learning (RL) to address the optimization challenges associated with algorithm configuration. However, making an RL agent work properly is a non-trivial task, especially in reward design, which necessitates a substantial amount of handcrafted knowledge based on domain expertise. In this work, we study the importance of reward design in the context of DAC via a case study on controlling the population size of the $(1+(\\lambda,\\lambda))$-GA optimizing OneMax. We observed that a poorly designed reward can hinder the RL agent's ability to learn an optimal policy because of a lack of exploration, leading to both scalability and learning divergence issues. To address those challenges, we propose the application of a reward shaping mechanism to facilitate enhanced exploration of the environment by the RL agent. Our work not only demonstrates the ability of RL in dynamically configuring the $(1+(\\lambda,\\lambda))$-GA, but also confirms the advantages of reward shaping in the scalability of RL agents across various sizes of OneMax problems.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.20265v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.20265v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"on-the-importance-of-reward-design-in","repo_url":"https://github.com/taindp98/OneMax-DAC","is_official":0,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"reinforcement-learning-1","task_name":"Reinforcement Learning (RL)"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"attention","method_name":"Attention"},{"method_slug":"dac","method_name":"DAC"},{"method_slug":"softmax","method_name":"Softmax"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}