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Related papers: Provably Efficient Maximum Entropy Exploration

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This work studies a multi-agent Markov decision process (MDP) that can undergo agent dropout and the computation of policies for the post-dropout system based on control and sampling of the pre-dropout system. The central planner's…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-09-24 Carmel Fiscko , Soummya Kar , Bruno Sinopoli

In a reward-free environment, what is a suitable intrinsic objective for an agent to pursue so that it can learn an optimal task-agnostic exploration policy? In this paper, we argue that the entropy of the state distribution induced by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-02 Mirco Mutti , Lorenzo Pratissoli , Marcello Restelli

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a fundamental framework for sequential decision-making, in which an agent learns an optimal policy through interactions with an unknown environment. In settings with function approximation, many existing RL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Ruiquan Huang , Donghao Li , Yingbin Liang , Jing Yang

General-purpose, intelligent, learning agents cycle through sequences of observations, actions, and rewards that are complex, uncertain, unknown, and non-Markovian. On the other hand, reinforcement learning is well-developed for small…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2009-12-30 Marcus Hutter

Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) have been used to formulate many decision-making problems in science and engineering. The objective is to synthesize the best decision (action selection) policies to maximize expected rewards (minimize…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2015-07-08 Mahmoud El Chamie , Behcet Acikmese

Standard Markov decision process (MDP) and reinforcement learning algorithms optimize the policy with respect to the expected gain. We propose an algorithm which enables to optimize an alternative objective: the probability that the gain is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-06 Vincent Corlay , Jean-Christophe Sibel

There has been growing progress on theoretical analyses for provably efficient learning in MDPs with linear function approximation, but much of the existing work has made strong assumptions to enable exploration by conventional exploration…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-23 Andrea Zanette , Alessandro Lazaric , Mykel J. Kochenderfer , Emma Brunskill

One of the significant challenges to generating value-aligned behavior is to not only account for the specified user objectives but also any implicit or unspecified user requirements. The existence of such implicit requirements could be…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-01-30 Silvia Tulli , Stylianos Loukas Vasileiou , Mohamed Chetouani , Sarath Sreedharan

We present a model-free reinforcement learning algorithm to find an optimal policy for a finite-horizon Markov decision process while guaranteeing a desired lower bound on the probability of satisfying a signal temporal logic (STL)…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2021-09-29 Krishna C. Kalagarla , Rahul Jain , Pierluigi Nuzzo

We investigate the problems of model estimation and reward-free learning in episodic Block MDPs. In these MDPs, the decision maker has access to rich observations or contexts generated from a small number of latent states. We are first…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-27 Yassir Jedra , Junghyun Lee , Alexandre Proutière , Se-Young Yun

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

Principled accountability for autonomous decision-making in uncertain environments requires distinguishing intentional outcomes from negligent designs from actual accidents. We propose analyzing the behavior of autonomous agents through a…

Consider a transmission scheme with a single transmitter and multiple receivers over a faulty broadcast channel. For each receiver, the transmitter has a unique infinite stream of packets, and its goal is to deliver them at the highest…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2015-10-27 Mark Shifrin , Asaf Cohen , Omer Gurewitz , Olga Weisman

We study the problem of synthesizing a controller that maximizes the entropy of a partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP) subject to a constraint on the expected total reward. Such a controller minimizes the predictability of…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-05-18 Yagiz Savas , Michael Hibbard , Bo Wu , Takashi Tanaka , Ufuk Topcu

We study planning problems where autonomous agents operate inside environments that are subject to uncertainties and not fully observable. Partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) are a natural formal model to capture such…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-02-28 Steven Carr , Nils Jansen , Ralf Wimmer , Jie Fu , Ufuk Topcu

Markov decision processes (MDPs) is viewed as an optimization of an objective function over certain linear operators over general function spaces. A new existence result is established for the existence of optimal policies in general MDPs,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-01 Abhishek Gupta , Aditya Mahajan

This work focuses on off-policy evaluation (OPE) with function approximation in infinite-horizon undiscounted Markov decision processes (MDPs). For MDPs that are ergodic and linear (i.e. where rewards and dynamics are linear in some known…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-24 Nevena Lazic , Dong Yin , Mehrdad Farajtabar , Nir Levine , Dilan Gorur , Chris Harris , Dale Schuurmans

Exploration is widely regarded as one of the most challenging aspects of reinforcement learning (RL), with many naive approaches succumbing to exponential sample complexity. To isolate the challenges of exploration, we propose a new…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-10 Chi Jin , Akshay Krishnamurthy , Max Simchowitz , Tiancheng Yu

Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs) are a natural and general model in reinforcement learning that take into account the agent's uncertainty about its current state. In the literature on POMDPs, it is customary to assume…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-24 Noah Golowich , Ankur Moitra , Dhruv Rohatgi

Markov Decision Problems (MDPs) provide a foundational framework for modelling sequential decision-making across diverse domains, guided by optimality criteria such as discounted and average rewards. However, these criteria have inherent…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-08-26 Dibyangshu Mukherjee , Shivaram Kalyanakrishnan