AI engineering glossary · Reinforcement learning
What is reward?
Reward: A single number the environment returns after each step, telling the learner how good that step was. Positive numbers encourage, negative numbers discourage. The learner's objective is built from these numbers, so the way they are defined strongly shapes the behaviour that emerges.
Reward: an example
A game gives +1 for winning, -1 for losing and 0 otherwise; a delivery task might give -1 per minute of delay.
Related terms
More Reinforcement learning terms
- Reward function
- Reward shaping
- Sample efficiency
- SARSA
- Score function estimator
- Self-play
- Sim-to-real transfer
- Softmax exploration
Where you learn it
Reward is part of the AI Engineering Program, which teaches it with notes, a hands-on lab and an exam. The first lesson is free.