English
Related papers

Related papers: Guided Policy Exploration for Markov Decision Proc…

200 papers

Black-box policy optimization is a class of reinforcement learning algorithms that explores and updates the policies at the parameter level. This class of algorithms is widely applied in robotics with movement primitives or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-22 Marius Memmel , Puze Liu , Davide Tateo , Jan Peters

Given subsets of uncertain values, we study the problem of identifying the subset of minimum total value (sum of the uncertain values) by querying as few values as possible. This set selection problem falls into the field of explorable…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2023-06-16 Nicole Megow , Jens Schlöter

In this paper, we consider the problem of safety assessment for Markov decision processes without explicit knowledge of the model. We aim to learn probabilistic safety specifications associated with a given policy without compromising the…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-12-11 Abhijit Mazumdar , Rafal Wisniewski , Manuela L. Bujorianu

Information theory has been very successful in obtaining performance limits for various problems such as communication, compression and hypothesis testing. Likewise, stochastic control theory provides a characterization of optimal policies…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2018-10-15 Dhruva Kartik , Ekraam Sabir , Urbashi Mitra , Prem Natarajan

We report a previously unidentified issue with model-free, value-based approaches to multiobjective reinforcement learning in the context of environments with stochastic state transitions. An example multiobjective Markov Decision Process…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-16 Peter Vamplew , Cameron Foale , Richard Dazeley

Many applications -- including power systems, robotics, and economics -- involve a dynamical system interacting with a stochastic and hard-to-model environment. We adopt a reinforcement learning approach to control such systems.…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-08-26 Abed AlRahman Al Makdah , Oliver Kosut , Lalitha Sankar , Shaofeng Zou

Active learning aims to select a small subset of data for annotation such that a classifier learned on the data is highly accurate. This is usually done using heuristic selection methods, however the effectiveness of such methods is limited…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2017-08-09 Meng Fang , Yuan Li , Trevor Cohn

Policy evaluation estimates the performance of a policy by (1) collecting data from the environment and (2) processing raw data into a meaningful estimate. Due to the sequential nature of reinforcement learning, any improper data-collecting…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-21 Shuze Daniel Liu , Claire Chen , Shangtong Zhang

Decision making under uncertainty is a key component of many AI settings, and in particular of voting scenarios where strategic agents are trying to reach a joint decision. The common approach to handle uncertainty is by maximizing expected…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2018-11-15 Omer Lev , Reshef Meir , Svetlana Obraztsova , Maria Polukarov

The aim of this paper is to study the reward based policy exploration problem in a supervised learning approach and enable robots to form complex movement trajectories in challenging reward settings and search spaces. For this, the…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-11-10 M. Tuluhan Akbulut , Utku Bozdogan , Ahmet Tekden , Emre Ugur

In communications, unknown variables are usually modelled as random variables, and concepts such as independence, entropy and information are defined in terms of the underlying probability distributions. In contrast, control theory often…

Systems and Control · Computer Science 2014-01-14 Girish N. Nair

Decision making in modern stochastic systems, including e-commerce platforms, financial markets and healthcare systems, has evolved into a multifaceted process that combines information acquisition and adaptive information sources. This…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-01-07 Renyuan Xu , Thaleia Zariphopoulou , Luhao Zhang

Efficient exploration in deep reinforcement learning remains a fundamental challenge, especially in environments characterized by high-dimensional states and sparse rewards. Traditional exploration strategies that rely on random local…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-24 Stergios Plataniotis , Charilaos Akasiadis , Georgios Chalkiadakis

Maneuver decision-making can be regarded as a Markov decision process and can be address by reinforcement learning. However, original reinforcement learning algorithms can hardly solve the maneuvering decision-making problem. One reason is…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-09-19 Zhang Hong-Peng

In many applications, it is desirable to extract only the relevant information from complex input data, which involves making a decision about which input features are relevant. The information bottleneck method formalizes this as an…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-04-28 Anirudh Goyal , Yoshua Bengio , Matthew Botvinick , Sergey Levine

The performance of learning-based control techniques crucially depends on how effectively the system is explored. While most exploration techniques aim to achieve a globally accurate model, such approaches are generally unsuited for systems…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-11 Alexandre Capone , Jonas Umlauft , Thomas Beckers , Armin Lederer , Sandra Hirche

Policy search reinforcement learning allows robots to acquire skills by themselves. However, the learning procedure is inherently unsafe as the robot has no a-priori way to predict the consequences of the exploratory actions it takes.…

Robotics · Computer Science 2018-10-09 Jens Lundell , Robert Krug , Erik Schaffernicht , Todor Stoyanov , Ville Kyrki

This paper describes a novel approach to planning which takes advantage of decision theory to greatly improve robustness in an uncertain environment. We present an algorithm which computes conditional plans of maximum expected utility. This…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2013-02-28 Stephen G. Pimentel , Lawrence M. Brem

In reinforcement learning, we typically refer to unsupervised pre-training when we aim to pre-train a policy without a priori access to the task specification, i.e. rewards, to be later employed for efficient learning of downstream tasks.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Riccardo Zamboni , Mirco Mutti , Marcello Restelli

In this paper we consider the problem of how a reinforcement learning agent tasked with solving a set of related Markov decision processes can use knowledge acquired early in its lifetime to improve its ability to more rapidly solve novel,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2019-02-26 Francisco M. Garcia , Bruno C. da Silva , Philip S. Thomas