Body: <p>I am training an A2C reinforcement learning agent in a dense reward environment (where rewards are known and explicit at every timestep).</p>
  
  <p><strong>Is it redundant to include the previous reward in the current observation space?</strong></p>
  
  <p>The reward is implicitly observed by the agent when collecting experiences and updating the network parameters. But could it also be useful for the agent to explicitly observe the reward of its previous action?</p>
  
Comments.ContentLicense: CC BY-SA 4.0
Comments.CreationDate: 2019-12-09T17:20:38.590Z
Comments.Text: By "current observation space" do you mean "current state"? In your environment, what is the relationship between observation and state?
Comments.UserDisplayName: Neil Slater
Comments.ContentLicense: CC BY-SA 4.0
Comments.CreationDate: 2019-12-09T17:23:19.830Z
Comments.Text: @NeilSlater yes, current observation and current state are the same thing. I use the terms interchangeably
Comments.UserDisplayName: PyRsquared
Tags: <reinforcement-learning><rewards>
Title: Should an RL agent directly observe the reward?
UserDisplayName: PyRsquared
ThreadText: # Should an RL agent directly observe the reward?
  
  (Asked by: username_0 on 2019-12-09)
  
  I am training an A2C reinforcement learning agent in a dense reward environment (where rewards are known and explicit at every timestep).
  
  **Is it redundant to include the previous reward in the current observation space?**
  
  The reward is implicitly observed by the agent when collecting experiences and updating the network parameters. But could it also be useful for the agent to explicitly observe the reward of its previous action?
  
  **Tags:** reinforcement-learning, rewards
  > **Comments:**
  > **username_1**: By "current observation space" do you mean "current state"? In your environment, what is the relationship between observation and state?  
  > **username_0**: @NeilSlater yes, current observation and current state are the same thing. I use the terms interchangeably  
  
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  ## 0 answers
  
  