English
Related papers

Related papers: Provably Efficient Maximum Entropy Exploration

200 papers

Learning a near optimal policy in a partially observable system remains an elusive challenge in contemporary reinforcement learning. In this work, we consider episodic reinforcement learning in a reward-mixing Markov decision process (MDP).…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-01 Jeongyeol Kwon , Yonathan Efroni , Constantine Caramanis , Shie Mannor

Efficient exploration remains a central challenge in reinforcement learning, serving as a useful pretraining objective for data collection, particularly when an external reward function is unavailable. A principled formulation of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-16 Jacob Adamczyk , Adam Kamoski , Rahul V. Kulkarni

We consider Incentive Decision Processes, where a principal seeks to reduce its costs due to another agent's behavior, by offering incentives to the agent for alternate behavior. We focus on the case where a principal interacts with a…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2012-10-19 Sashank J. Reddi , Emma Brunskill

Understanding emerging behaviors of reinforcement learning (RL) agents may be difficult since such agents are often trained in complex environments using highly complex decision making procedures. This has given rise to a variety of…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-12-02 Mira Finkelstein , Lucy Liu , Nitsan Levy Schlot , Yoav Kolumbus , David C. Parkes , Jeffrey S. Rosenshein , Sarah Keren

This paper proposes an intent-aware multi-agent planning framework as well as a learning algorithm. Under this framework, an agent plans in the goal space to maximize the expected utility. The planning process takes the belief of other…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-03-07 Siyuan Qi , Song-Chun Zhu

Large-scale Markov decision processes (MDPs) require planning algorithms with runtime independent of the number of states of the MDP. We consider the planning problem in MDPs using linear value function approximation with only weak…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-14 Roshan Shariff , Csaba Szepesvári

Within the framework of probably approximately correct Markov decision processes (PAC-MDP), much theoretical work has focused on methods to attain near optimality after a relatively long period of learning and exploration. However,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2016-04-06 Kenji Kawaguchi

In tabular Markov decision processes (MDPs) with perfect state observability, each trajectory provides active samples from the transition distributions conditioned on state-action pairs. Consequently, accurate model estimation depends on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-25 Xihe Gu , Urbashi Mitra , Tara Javidi

We study the problem of synthesizing a policy that maximizes the entropy of a Markov decision process (MDP) subject to a temporal logic constraint. Such a policy minimizes the predictability of the paths it generates, or dually, maximizes…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-06-17 Yagiz Savas , Melkior Ornik , Murat Cubuktepe , Mustafa O. Karabag , Ufuk Topcu

Markov decision processes (MDPs) are a popular model for performance analysis and optimization of stochastic systems. The parameters of stochastic behavior of MDPs are estimates from empirical observations of a system; their values are not…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-10-26 Dimitri Scheftelowitsch , Peter Buchholz , Vahid Hashemi , Holger Hermanns

We study the common generalization of Markov decision processes (MDPs) with sets of transition probabilities, known as robust MDPs (RMDPs). A standard goal in RMDPs is to compute a policy that maximizes the expected return under an…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-11-20 Alessandro Abate , Thom Badings , Giuseppe De Giacomo , Francesco Fabiano

An algorithmic decision-maker incentivizes people to act in certain ways to receive better decisions. These incentives can dramatically influence subjects' behaviors and lives, and it is important that both decision-makers and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-15 Yonadav Shavit , William S. Moses

In classical reinforcement learning, when exploring an environment, agents accept arbitrary short term loss for long term gain. This is infeasible for safety critical applications, such as robotics, where even a single unsafe action may…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-01-30 Matteo Turchetta , Felix Berkenkamp , Andreas Krause

General purpose intelligent learning agents cycle through (complex,non-MDP) sequences of observations, actions, and rewards. On the other hand, reinforcement learning is well-developed for small finite state Markov Decision Processes…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2009-12-30 Marcus Hutter

We study model-based learning of finite-window policies in tabular partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs). A common approach to learning under partial observability is to approximate unbounded history dependencies using…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-02 Philip Jordan , Maryam Kamgarpour

We introduce and study constrained Markov Decision Processes (cMDPs) with anytime constraints. An anytime constraint requires the agent to never violate its budget at any point in time, almost surely. Although Markovian policies are no…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-14 Jeremy McMahan , Xiaojin Zhu

We present a general framework for applying learning algorithms and heuristical guidance to the verification of Markov decision processes (MDPs). The primary goal of our techniques is to improve performance by avoiding an exhaustive…

Safe reinforcement learning has been a promising approach for optimizing the policy of an agent that operates in safety-critical applications. In this paper, we propose an algorithm, SNO-MDP, that explores and optimizes Markov decision…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-18 Akifumi Wachi , Yanan Sui

We study multi-objective reinforcement learning (RL) where an agent's reward is represented as a vector. In settings where an agent competes against opponents, its performance is measured by the distance of its average return vector to a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-08 Tiancheng Yu , Yi Tian , Jingzhao Zhang , Suvrit Sra

We consider synthesis of control policies that maximize the probability of satisfying given temporal logic specifications in unknown, stochastic environments. We model the interaction between the system and its environment as a Markov…

Systems and Control · Computer Science 2014-05-01 Jie Fu , Ufuk Topcu