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Processes (MDPs) often require frequent decision making, that is, taking an action every microsecond, second, or minute. Infinite horizon discount reward formulation is still relevant for a large portion of these applications, because…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2014-12-17 Yin-Lam Chow , Junjie Qin

Tail-end risk measures such as static conditional value-at-risk (CVaR) are used in safety-critical applications to prevent rare, yet catastrophic events. Unlike risk-neutral objectives, the static CVaR of the return depends on entire…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Aneri Muni , Vincent Taboga , Esther Derman , Pierre-Luc Bacon , Erick Delage

In Markov Decision Processes (MDPs), the reward obtained in a state depends on the properties of the last state and action. This state dependency makes it difficult to reward more interesting long-term behaviors, such as always closing a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-06-27 Ronen Brafman , Giuseppe De Giacomo , Fabio Patrizi

We introduce a novel approach to hierarchical reinforcement learning for Linearly-solvable Markov Decision Processes (LMDPs) in the infinite-horizon average-reward setting. Unlike previous work, our approach allows learning low-level and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-10 Guillermo Infante , Anders Jonsson , Vicenç Gómez

Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) describes the problem of learning an unknown reward function of a Markov Decision Process (MDP) from observed behavior of an agent. Since the agent's behavior originates in its policy and MDP policies…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2016-04-14 Michael Herman , Tobias Gindele , Jörg Wagner , Felix Schmitt , Wolfram Burgard

Despite recent successes in Reinforcement Learning, value-based methods often suffer from high variance hindering performance. In this paper, we illustrate this in a continuous control setting where state of the art methods perform poorly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-24 Pierre Thodoroff , Nishanth Anand , Lucas Caccia , Doina Precup , Joelle Pineau

Multi-task representation learning (MTRL) is an approach that learns shared latent representations across related tasks, facilitating collaborative learning that improves the overall learning efficiency. This paper studies MTRL for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-07 Yaoze Guo , Shana Moothedath

Reinforcement learning (RL) typically models the interaction between the agent and environment as a Markov decision process (MDP), where the rewards that guide the agent's behavior are always observable. However, in many real-world…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-05-15 Montaser Mohammedalamen , Michael Bowling

The goal of this paper is to study a distributed version of the gradient temporal-difference (GTD) learning algorithm for a class of multi-agent Markov decision processes (MDPs). The temporal-difference (TD) learning is a reinforcement…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-04-29 Donghwan Lee , Jianghai Hu

We study reinforcement learning in infinite-horizon average-reward settings with linear MDPs. Previous work addresses this problem by approximating the average-reward setting by discounted setting and employing a value iteration-based…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-17 Kihyuk Hong , Ambuj Tewari

In this paper, we consider reinforcement learning of Markov Decision Processes (MDP) with peak constraints, where an agent chooses a policy to optimize an objective and at the same time satisfy additional constraints. The agent has to take…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-12-09 Ather Gattami

In this paper, we propose a new solution to reward adaptation (RA) in reinforcement learning, where the agent adapts to a target reward function based on one or more existing source behaviors learned a priori under the same domain dynamics…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-23 Kevin Vora , Yu Zhang

Model-based reinforcement learning (RL) is appealing because (i) it enables planning and thus more strategic exploration, and (ii) by decoupling dynamics from rewards, it enables fast transfer to new reward functions. However, learning an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-14 Evan Zheran Liu , Ramtin Keramati , Sudarshan Seshadri , Kelvin Guu , Panupong Pasupat , Emma Brunskill , Percy Liang

Standard reinforcement learning (RL) assumes that an agent can observe a reward for each state-action pair. However, in practical applications, it is often difficult and costly to collect a reward for each state-action pair. While there…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-18 Yihan Du , Anna Winnicki , Gal Dalal , Shie Mannor , R. Srikant

In reinforcement learning, the discount factor $\gamma$ controls the agent's effective planning horizon. Traditionally, this parameter was considered part of the MDP; however, as deep reinforcement learning algorithms tend to become…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-24 Chen Tessler , Shie Mannor

No real-world reward function is perfect. Sensory errors and software bugs may result in RL agents observing higher (or lower) rewards than they should. For example, a reinforcement learning agent may prefer states where a sensory error…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-08-22 Tom Everitt , Victoria Krakovna , Laurent Orseau , Marcus Hutter , Shane Legg

Reinforcement learning (RL) shows great potential for optimizing multi-vehicle cooperative driving strategies through the state-action-reward feedback loop, but it still faces challenges such as low sample efficiency. This paper proposes a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-08-12 Ye Han , Lijun Zhang , Dejian Meng , Zhuang Zhang

In reinforcement learning (RL), an agent learns to perform a task by interacting with an environment and receiving feedback (a numerical reward) for its actions. However, the assumption that rewards are always observable is often not…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-15 Simone Parisi , Montaser Mohammedalamen , Alireza Kazemipour , Matthew E. Taylor , Michael Bowling

We consider reinforcement learning (RL) for a class of problems with bagged decision times. A bag contains a finite sequence of consecutive decision times. The transition dynamics are non-Markovian and non-stationary within a bag. All…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-08 Daiqi Gao , Hsin-Yu Lai , Predrag Klasnja , Susan A. Murphy

In most of the transfer learning approaches to reinforcement learning (RL) the distribution over the tasks is assumed to be stationary. Therefore, the target and source tasks are i.i.d. samples of the same distribution. In the context of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-19 Giuseppe Canonaco , Andrea Soprani , Manuel Roveri , Marcello Restelli