your policy to converge to desired behavior there are some significant downsides to reward shaping so firstly reward shaping is a custom process that needs to be redone for every new environment you want to train a policy so if you're looking at the benchmark of Atari for example well you would have to craft a new reward function for every single one of those games that's just not scalable the second problem is that we Ward shaping suffers from what we call the alignment problem so it turns out that reward shaping is actually