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Extrinsic rewards can effectively guide reinforcement learning (RL) agents in specific tasks. However, extrinsic rewards frequently fall short in complex environments due to the significant human effort needed for their design and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-28 Mingqi Yuan , Roger Creus Castanyer , Bo Li , Xin Jin , Wenjun Zeng , Glen Berseth

Reward machines are an established tool for dealing with reinforcement learning problems in which rewards are sparse and depend on complex sequences of actions. However, existing algorithms for learning reward machines assume an overly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-20 Jan Corazza , Ivan Gavran , Daniel Neider

Self-paced reinforcement learning (RL) aims to improve the data efficiency of learning by automatically creating sequences, namely curricula, of probability distributions over contexts. However, existing techniques for self-paced RL fail in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-29 Cevahir Koprulu , Ufuk Topcu

In real-world applications of reinforcement learning, it is often challenging to obtain a state representation that is parsimonious and satisfies the Markov property without prior knowledge. Consequently, it is common practice to construct…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-07-31 Tao Ma , Jin Zhu , Hengrui Cai , Zhengling Qi , Yunxiao Chen , Chengchun Shi , Eric B. Laber

Reward design is a critical part of the application of reinforcement learning, the performance of which strongly depends on how well the reward signal frames the goal of the designer and how well the signal assesses progress in reaching…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-01 Yixiang Wang , Yujing Hu , Feng Wu , Yingfeng Chen

We investigate an infinite-horizon average reward Markov Decision Process (MDP) with delayed, composite, and partially anonymous reward feedback. The delay and compositeness of rewards mean that rewards generated as a result of taking an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-29 Washim Uddin Mondal , Vaneet Aggarwal

In many sequential decision-making problems one is interested in minimizing an expected cumulative cost while taking into account \emph{risk}, i.e., increased awareness of events of small probability and high consequences. Accordingly, the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-04-07 Yinlam Chow , Mohammad Ghavamzadeh , Lucas Janson , Marco Pavone

It is a long-standing question to discover causal relations among a set of variables in many empirical sciences. Recently, Reinforcement Learning (RL) has achieved promising results in causal discovery from observational data. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-16 Xiaoqiang Wang , Yali Du , Shengyu Zhu , Liangjun Ke , Zhitang Chen , Jianye Hao , Jun Wang

Reactive synthesis algorithms allow automatic construction of policies to control an environment modeled as a Markov Decision Process (MDP) that are optimal with respect to high-level temporal logic specifications. However, they assume that…

Formal Languages and Automata Theory · Computer Science 2022-05-31 Rajeev Alur , Suguman Bansal , Osbert Bastani , Kishor Jothimurugan

Maximum entropy reinforcement learning motivates agents to explore states and actions to maximize the entropy of some distribution, typically by providing additional intrinsic rewards proportional to that entropy function. In this paper, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-20 Adrien Bolland , Gaspard Lambrechts , Damien Ernst

Deep reinforcement learning agents achieve state-of-the-art performance in a wide range of simulated control tasks. However, successful applications to real-world problems remain limited. One reason for this dichotomy is because the learnt…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-27 Rory Young , Nicolas Pugeault

This paper presents a novel state representation for reward-free Markov decision processes. The idea is to learn, in a self-supervised manner, an embedding space where distances between pairs of embedded states correspond to the minimum…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-05 Lorenzo Steccanella , Anders Jonsson

In the standard data analysis framework, data is collected (once and for all), and then data analysis is carried out. However, with the advancement of digital technology, decision-makers constantly analyze past data and generate new data…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-12-25 Jin Li , Ye Luo , Zigan Wang , Xiaowei Zhang

We consider reinforcement learning in input-driven environments, where an exogenous, stochastic input process affects the dynamics of the system. Input processes arise in many applications, including queuing systems, robotics control with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-02-28 Hongzi Mao , Shaileshh Bojja Venkatakrishnan , Malte Schwarzkopf , Mohammad Alizadeh

Much of the current work on reinforcement learning studies episodic settings, where the agent is reset between trials to an initial state distribution, often with well-shaped reward functions. Non-episodic settings, where the agent must…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-23 John D. Co-Reyes , Suvansh Sanjeev , Glen Berseth , Abhishek Gupta , Sergey Levine

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

We consider a Markov decision process with deterministic state transition dynamics, adversarially generated rewards that change arbitrarily from round to round, and a bandit feedback model in which the decision maker only observes the…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2012-10-19 Raman Arora , Ofer Dekel , Ambuj Tewari

For task-oriented dialog systems, training a Reinforcement Learning (RL) based Dialog Management module suffers from low sample efficiency and slow convergence speed due to the sparse rewards in RL.To solve this problem, many strategies…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-04-13 Zhengxu Hou , Bang Liu , Ruihui Zhao , Zijing Ou , Yafei Liu , Xi Chen , Yefeng Zheng

Measuring states in reinforcement learning (RL) can be costly in real-world settings and may negatively influence future outcomes. We introduce the Actively Observable Markov Decision Process (AOMDP), where an agent not only selects control…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-17 Daiqi Gao , Ziping Xu , Aseel Rawashdeh , Predrag Klasnja , Susan A. Murphy

We introduce a novel framework to account for sensitivity to rewards uncertainty in sequential decision-making problems. While risk-sensitive formulations for Markov decision processes studied so far focus on the distribution of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-09-16 Nelson Vadori , Sumitra Ganesh , Prashant Reddy , Manuela Veloso