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Related papers: A PAC RL Algorithm for Episodic POMDPs

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Solving Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs) is hard. Learning optimal controllers for POMDPs when the model is unknown is harder. Online learning of optimal controllers for unknown POMDPs, which requires efficient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-16 Mehdi Jafarnia-Jahromi , Rahul Jain , Ashutosh Nayyar

Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has made considerable advances in simulated and physical robot control tasks, especially when problems admit a fully observed Markov Decision Process (MDP) formulation. When observations only partially…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Lingheng Meng , Rob Gorbet , Michael Burke , Dana Kulić

This paper introduces a simple efficient learning algorithms for general sequential decision making. The algorithm combines Optimism for exploration with Maximum Likelihood Estimation for model estimation, which is thus named OMLE. We prove…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-24 Qinghua Liu , Praneeth Netrapalli , Csaba Szepesvári , Chi Jin

Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs) are a natural and general model in reinforcement learning that take into account the agent's uncertainty about its current state. In the literature on POMDPs, it is customary to assume…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-24 Noah Golowich , Ankur Moitra , Dhruv Rohatgi

Hybrid Reinforcement Learning (RL), where an agent learns from both an offline dataset and online explorations in an unknown environment, has garnered significant recent interest. A crucial question posed by Xie et al. (2022) is whether…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-08-09 Kevin Tan , Wei Fan , Yuting Wei

Several practical applications of reinforcement learning involve an agent learning from past data without the possibility of further exploration. Often these applications require us to 1) identify a near optimal policy or to 2) estimate the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-22 Andrea Zanette

In this paper, we propose new problem-independent lower bounds on the sample complexity and regret in episodic MDPs, with a particular focus on the non-stationary case in which the transition kernel is allowed to change in each stage of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-09 Omar Darwiche Domingues , Pierre Ménard , Emilie Kaufmann , Michal Valko

We consider primal-dual-based reinforcement learning (RL) in episodic constrained Markov decision processes (CMDPs) with non-stationary objectives and constraints, which plays a central role in ensuring the safety of RL in time-varying…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-22 Yuhao Ding , Javad Lavaei

This paper proposes Partially Observable Reference Policy Programming, a novel anytime online approximate POMDP solver which samples meaningful future histories very deeply while simultaneously forcing a gradual policy update. We provide…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-07-17 Edward Kim , Hanna Kurniawati

The following questions are often encountered in system and control theory. Given an algebraic model of a physical process, which variables can be, in theory, deduced from the input-output behavior of an experiment? How many of the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-10-20 Alexandre Sedoglavic

Many reinforcement learning (RL) environments in practice feature enormous state spaces that may be described compactly by a "factored" structure, that may be modeled by Factored Markov Decision Processes (FMDPs). We present the first…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-08 Zihao Deng , Siddartha Devic , Brendan Juba

Optimal decision making with limited or no information in stochastic environments where multiple agents interact is a challenging topic in the realm of artificial intelligence. Reinforcement learning (RL) is a popular approach for arriving…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-01-08 Roi Ceren

In this study, we derive Probably Approximately Correct (PAC) bounds on the asymptotic sample-complexity for RL within the infinite-horizon Markov Decision Process (MDP) setting that are sharper than those in existing literature. The…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-17 Mohit Prashant , Arvind Easwaran

Reinforcement learning (RL) under changing environment models many real-world applications via nonstationary Markov Decision Processes (MDPs), and hence gains considerable interest. However, theoretical studies on nonstationary MDPs in the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-11 Yuan Cheng , Jing Yang , Yingbin Liang

Partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) provide an elegant mathematical framework for modeling complex decision and planning problems in stochastic domains in which states of the system are observable only indirectly, via a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2011-06-02 M. Hauskrecht

Real world applications of Reinforcement Learning (RL) are often partially observable, thus requiring memory. Despite this, partial observability is still largely ignored by contemporary RL benchmarks and libraries. We introduce Partially…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-06 Steven Morad , Ryan Kortvelesy , Matteo Bettini , Stephan Liwicki , Amanda Prorok

Partially-Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs) are a well-known stochastic model for sequential decision making under limited information. We consider the EXPTIME-hard problem of synthesising policies that almost-surely reach some…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-03-22 Sebastian Junges , Nils Jansen , Sanjit A. Seshia

Optimistic algorithms have been extensively studied for regret minimization in episodic tabular MDPs, both from a minimax and an instance-dependent view. However, for the PAC RL problem, where the goal is to identify a near-optimal policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-14 Andrea Tirinzoni , Aymen Al-Marjani , Emilie Kaufmann

In this thesis, we research learning algorithms for optimal decision making in two different contexts, Reinforcement Learning in Part I and Auction Design in Part II. Reinforcement learning (RL) is an area of machine learning that is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-07 Jad Rahme

We study the exploration problem with approximate linear action-value functions in episodic reinforcement learning under the notion of low inherent Bellman error, a condition normally employed to show convergence of approximate value…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-30 Andrea Zanette , Alessandro Lazaric , Mykel Kochenderfer , Emma Brunskill