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The deployment of reinforcement learning (RL) in the real world comes with challenges in calibrating user trust and expectations. As a step toward developing RL systems that are able to communicate their competencies, we present a method of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-19 Aastha Acharya , Rebecca Russell , Nisar R. Ahmed

In real-world reinforcement learning (RL) systems, various forms of {\it impaired observability} can complicate matters. These situations arise when an agent is unable to observe the most recent state of the system due to latency or lossy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-30 Minshuo Chen , Jie Meng , Yu Bai , Yinyu Ye , H. Vincent Poor , Mengdi Wang

State abstraction enables sample-efficient learning and better task transfer in complex reinforcement learning environments. Recently, we proposed RePReL (Kokel et al. 2021), a hierarchical framework that leverages a relational planner to…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-10-19 Harsha Kokel , Arjun Manoharan , Sriraam Natarajan , Balaraman Ravindran , Prasad Tadepalli

Planning methods can solve temporally extended sequential decision making problems by composing simple behaviors. However, planning requires suitable abstractions for the states and transitions, which typically need to be designed by hand.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-20 Soroush Nasiriany , Vitchyr H. Pong , Steven Lin , Sergey Levine

Recent advances in reinforcement-learning research have demonstrated impressive results in building algorithms that can out-perform humans in complex tasks. Nevertheless, creating reinforcement-learning systems that can build abstractions…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-08 Lucas Lehnert , Michael J. Frank , Michael L. Littman

Lying on the heart of intelligent decision-making systems, how policy is represented and optimized is a fundamental problem. The root challenge in this problem is the large scale and the high complexity of policy space, which exacerbates…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-19 Min Zhang , Hongyao Tang , Jianye Hao , Yan Zheng

Neural abstractions have been recently introduced as formal approximations of complex, nonlinear dynamical models. They comprise a neural ODE and a certified upper bound on the error between the abstract neural network and the concrete…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2023-10-03 Alec Edwards , Mirco Giacobbe , Alessandro Abate

Previous approaches to constructing abstractions for control systems rely on geometric conditions or, in the case of an interconnected control system, a condition on the interconnection topology. Since these conditions are not always…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-05-22 Stanley W. Smith , Murat Arcak , Majid Zamani

Abstraction plays an important role in the generalisation of knowledge and skills and is key to sample efficient learning. In this work, we study joint temporal and state abstraction in reinforcement learning, where temporally-extended…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-09 Dongge Han , Sebastian Tschiatschek

Accuracy and generalization of dynamics models is key to the success of model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL). As the complexity of tasks increases, so does the sample inefficiency of learning accurate dynamics models. However, many…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-08 Manan Tomar , Amy Zhang , Roberto Calandra , Matthew E. Taylor , Joelle Pineau

The exploration-exploitation dilemma in reinforcement learning (RL) is a fundamental challenge to efficient RL algorithms. Existing algorithms for finite state and action discounted RL problems address this by assuming sufficient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-09 Caleb Ju , Guanghui Lan

Distributionally robust offline reinforcement learning (RL), which seeks robust policy training against environment perturbation by modeling dynamics uncertainty, calls for function approximations when facing large state-action spaces.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-03 Zhishuai Liu , Pan Xu

In this paper, we develop a framework for path-planning on abstractions that are not provided to the agent a priori but instead emerge as a function of the available computational resources. We show how a path-planning problem in an…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-07-29 Daniel T. Larsson , Dipankar Maity , Panagiotis Tsiotras

Policy gradient methods are among the most effective methods in challenging reinforcement learning problems with large state and/or action spaces. However, little is known about even their most basic theoretical convergence properties,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-16 Alekh Agarwal , Sham M. Kakade , Jason D. Lee , Gaurav Mahajan

We consider a reinforcement learning setting introduced in (Maillard et al., NIPS 2011) where the learner does not have explicit access to the states of the underlying Markov decision process (MDP). Instead, she has access to several models…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2014-09-16 Ronald Ortner , Odalric-Ambrym Maillard , Daniil Ryabko

Reinforcement learning algorithms typically necessitate extensive exploration of the state space to find optimal policies. However, in safety-critical applications, the risks associated with such exploration can lead to catastrophic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-28 Kaustubh Mani , Vincent Mai , Charlie Gauthier , Annie Chen , Samer Nashed , Liam Paull

Reinforcement learning (RL) on high-dimensional and complex problems relies on abstraction for improved efficiency and generalization. In this paper, we study abstraction in the continuous-control setting, and extend the definition of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-08 Prakash Panangaden , Sahand Rezaei-Shoshtari , Rosie Zhao , David Meger , Doina Precup

Reinforcement learning (RL) methods have been shown to be capable of learning intelligent behavior in rich domains. However, this has largely been done in simulated domains without adequate focus on the process of building the simulator. In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-24 Aditya Modi , Nan Jiang , Ambuj Tewari , Satinder Singh

Equivariant neural networks have shown great success in reinforcement learning, improving sample efficiency and generalization when there is symmetry in the task. However, in many problems, only approximate symmetry is present, which makes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-24 Jung Yeon Park , Sujay Bhatt , Sihan Zeng , Lawson L. S. Wong , Alec Koppel , Sumitra Ganesh , Robin Walters

Due to information asymmetry, finding optimal policies for Decentralized Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (Dec-POMDPs) is hard with the complexity growing doubly exponentially in the horizon length. The challenge increases…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-26 Hsu Kao , Vijay Subramanian