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Abstraction is crucial for effective sequential decision making in domains with large state spaces. In this work, we propose an information bottleneck method for learning approximate bisimulations, a type of state abstraction. We use a deep…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-12 Ondrej Biza , Robert Platt , Jan-Willem van de Meent , Lawson L. S. Wong

Multi-agent reinforcement learning (RL) often struggles to ensure the safe behaviours of the learning agents, and therefore it is generally not adapted to safety-critical applications. To address this issue, we present a methodology that…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2021-04-05 Pierre El Mqirmi , Francesco Belardinelli , Borja G. León

We characterise the problem of abstraction in the context of deep reinforcement learning. Various well established approaches to analogical reasoning and associative memory might be brought to bear on this issue, but they present…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-02 Murray Shanahan , Melanie Mitchell

Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms based on high-dimensional function approximation have achieved tremendous empirical success in large-scale problems with an enormous number of states. However, most analysis of such algorithms gives…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-17 Jihao Long , Jiequn Han , Weinan E

While humans readily generalize abstract concepts to more complex or larger tasks, building Reinforcement Learning (RL) systems with this ability remains elusive. Here, we present the first theoretical model of how such Out-of-Distribution…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Nasehatul Mustakim , Lucas Lehnert

Goal representation affects the performance of Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning (HRL) algorithms by decomposing the complex learning problem into easier subtasks. Recent studies show that representations that preserve temporally abstract…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-24 Mehdi Zadem , Sergio Mover , Sao Mai Nguyen

Batch reinforcement learning (RL) is important to apply RL algorithms to many high stakes tasks. Doing batch RL in a way that yields a reliable new policy in large domains is challenging: a new decision policy may visit states and actions…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-23 Yao Liu , Adith Swaminathan , Alekh Agarwal , Emma Brunskill

Tasks such as social network analysis, human behavior recognition, or modeling biochemical reactions, can be solved elegantly by using the probabilistic inference framework. However, standard probabilistic inference algorithms work at a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-12-11 Stefan Lüdtke , Max Schröder , Frank Krüger , Sebastian Bader , Thomas Kirste

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has demonstrated tremendous empirical success across numerous challenging domains. However, we lack a strong theoretical understanding of the statistical complexity of RL in environments with large state spaces,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Gene Li

Generating an abstraction of a dynamic domain that aligns with a given purpose remains a significant challenge given that the choice of such an abstraction can impact an agent's ability to plan, reason, and provide explanations effectively.…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-24 Bita Banihashemi , Megh Patel , Yves Lespérance

As trajectories sampled by policies used by reinforcement learning (RL) and generative flow networks (GFlowNets) grow longer, credit assignment and exploration become more challenging, and the long planning horizon hinders mode discovery…

Neural systems, artificial and biological, show similar representations of inputs when optimized to perform similar tasks. In visual systems optimized for tasks similar to object recognition, we propose that representation similarities…

Neurons and Cognition · Quantitative Biology 2023-12-15 Tahereh Toosi

Learned representations in deep reinforcement learning (DRL) have to extract task-relevant information from complex observations, balancing between robustness to distraction and informativeness to the policy. Such stable and rich…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-28 Mete Kemertas , Tristan Aumentado-Armstrong

Learning from demonstrations is a common way for users to teach robots, but it is prone to spurious feature correlations. Recent work constructs state abstractions, i.e. visual representations containing task-relevant features, from…

This paper is concerned with a detailed comparison of two different abstraction techniques for the construction of finite state symbolic models for controller synthesis of hybrid systems. Namely, we compare quotient based abstractions…

Systems and Control · Computer Science 2015-07-28 Anne-Kathrin Schmuck , Paulo Tabuada , Jörg Raisch

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) is a challenging setting where existing off-policy actor-critic methods perform poorly due to the overestimation of out-of-distribution state-action pairs. Thus, various additional augmentations are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-23 Zifeng Zhuang , Kun Lei , Jinxin Liu , Donglin Wang , Yilang Guo

Building generalizable goal-conditioned agents from rich observations is a key to reinforcement learning (RL) solving real world problems. Traditionally in goal-conditioned RL, an agent is provided with the exact goal they intend to reach.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-18 Philippe Hansen-Estruch , Amy Zhang , Ashvin Nair , Patrick Yin , Sergey Levine

Learning abstractions directly from data is a core challenge in robotics. Humans naturally operate at an abstract level, reasoning over high-level subgoals while delegating execution to low-level motor skills -- an ability that enables…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-03-23 Abhiroop Ajith , Constantinos Chamzas

We consider a class of reinforcement-learning systems in which the agent follows a behavior policy to explore a discrete state-action space to find an optimal policy while adhering to some restriction on its behavior. Such restriction may…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-07 Peter C. Y. Chen

In probably approximately correct (PAC) reinforcement learning (RL), an agent is required to identify an $\epsilon$-optimal policy with probability $1-\delta$. While minimax optimal algorithms exist for this problem, its instance-dependent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-25 Andrea Tirinzoni , Aymen Al-Marjani , Emilie Kaufmann