“Reward” in RL is just a real number that tells an agent how well it’s doing. If the reward is negative that could be called punishment. Importantly the agent i

“Reward” in RL is just a real number that tells an agent how well it’s doing. If the reward is negative that could be called punishment. Importantly the agent is choosing actions to maximize (expected estimated) reward, so only the relative reward values matter. So if an agent is choosing among exactly three actions and it knows they’ll give rewards [0, -1, +1], the agent will behave the same as if the rewards were [-100, -101, -99].