Reward Shaping Formula

An agent is being trained to navigate a complex maze. It receives a large positive reward (+100) only upon reaching the exit, and a reward of 0 for all other steps. To accelerate learning in this environment with delayed feedback, a developer decides to add an additional, intermediate reward at each step. Which of the following intermediate reward strategies is most likely to guide the agent effectively toward the exit without inadvertently changing the optimal path?

Analyzing Reward Shaping Strategies for Text Summarization

A key advantage of implementing a potential-based reward shaping function is that it fundamentally alters the optimal set of actions an agent should take, thereby simplifying complex problems with sparse rewards.