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Related papers: Active Exploration in Markov Decision Processes

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We study reward-free reinforcement learning (RL) with linear function approximation, where the agent works in two phases: (1) in the exploration phase, the agent interacts with the environment but cannot access the reward; and (2) in the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-15 Junkai Zhang , Weitong Zhang , Quanquan Gu

The Exploration-Exploitation tradeoff arises in Reinforcement Learning when one cannot tell if a policy is optimal. Then, there is a constant need to explore new actions instead of exploiting past experience. In practice, it is common to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-09-10 Lior Shani , Yonathan Efroni , Shie Mannor

Robust Markov decision processes (MDPs) allow to compute reliable solutions for dynamic decision problems whose evolution is modeled by rewards and partially-known transition probabilities. Unfortunately, accounting for uncertainty in the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-18 Chin Pang Ho , Marek Petrik , Wolfram Wiesemann

We introduce Random Reward Perturbation (RRP), a novel exploration strategy for reinforcement learning (RL). Our theoretical analyses demonstrate that adding zero-mean noise to environmental rewards effectively enhances policy diversity…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-11 Haozhe Ma , Guoji Fu , Zhengding Luo , Jiele Wu , Tze-Yun Leong

We study the problem of learning policy of an infinite-horizon, discounted cost, Markov decision process (MDP) with a large number of states. We compute the actions of a policy that is nearly as good as a policy chosen by a suitable oracle…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-09-02 Masoud Badiei Khuzani , Varun Vasudevan , Hongyi Ren , Lei Xing

Decision-making problems in uncertain or stochastic domains are often formulated as Markov decision processes (MDPs). Policy iteration (PI) is a popular algorithm for searching over policy-space, the size of which is exponential in the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2013-01-30 Yishay Mansour , Satinder Singh

Integrated task and motion planning has emerged as a challenging problem in sequential decision making, where a robot needs to compute high-level strategy and low-level motion plans for solving complex tasks. While high-level strategies…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-02-19 Siddharth Srivastava , Nishant Desai , Richard Freedman , Shlomo Zilberstein

Markov decision processes are a ubiquitous formalism for modelling systems with non-deterministic and probabilistic behavior. Verification of these models is subject to the famous state space explosion problem. We alleviate this problem by…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-06-07 Sebastian Junges , Matthijs T. J. Spaan

Software-intensive systems, such as software product lines and robotics, utilise Markov decision processes (MDPs) to capture uncertainty and analyse sequential decision-making problems. Despite the usefulness of conventional policy…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-01 Alexandros Evangelidis , Gricel Vázquez , Simos Gerasimou

Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) are a mathematical framework for modeling sequential decision making under uncertainty. The classical approaches for solving MDPs are well known and have been widely studied, some of which rely on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-05-18 Joshua R. Bertram , Xuxi Yang , Peng Wei

A popular perspective in Reinforcement learning (RL) casts the problem as probabilistic inference on a graphical model of the Markov decision process (MDP). The core object of study is the probability of each state-action pair being visited…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-23 Jean Tarbouriech , Tor Lattimore , Brendan O'Donoghue

We study the explore-exploit tradeoff in distributed cooperative decision-making using the context of the multiarmed bandit (MAB) problem. For the distributed cooperative MAB problem, we design the cooperative UCB algorithm that comprises…

Systems and Control · Computer Science 2019-09-17 Peter Landgren , Vaibhav Srivastava , Naomi Ehrich Leonard

A key challenge in applying reinforcement learning to safety-critical domains is understanding how to balance exploration (needed to attain good performance on the task) with safety (needed to avoid catastrophic failure). Although a growing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-23 Melrose Roderick , Vaishnavh Nagarajan , J. Zico Kolter

In many real-world problems, there is the possibility to configure, to a limited extent, some environmental parameters to improve the performance of a learning agent. In this paper, we propose a novel framework, Configurable Markov Decision…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-06-15 Alberto Maria Metelli , Mirco Mutti , Marcello Restelli

Count-based exploration algorithms are known to perform near-optimally when used in conjunction with tabular reinforcement learning (RL) methods for solving small discrete Markov decision processes (MDPs). It is generally thought that…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-12-06 Haoran Tang , Rein Houthooft , Davis Foote , Adam Stooke , Xi Chen , Yan Duan , John Schulman , Filip De Turck , Pieter Abbeel

Decision makers, such as doctors and judges, make crucial decisions such as recommending treatments to patients, and granting bails to defendants on a daily basis. Such decisions typically involve weighting the potential benefits of taking…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2016-10-25 Himabindu Lakkaraju , Cynthia Rudin

We investigate the problem of designing optimal stealthy poisoning attacks on the control channel of Markov decision processes (MDPs). This research is motivated by the recent interest of the research community for adversarial and poisoning…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2021-09-16 Alessio Russo , Alexandre Proutiere

With the explosion of massive, widely available unlabeled data in the past years, finding label and time efficient, robust learning algorithms has become ever more important in theory and in practice. We study the paradigm of active…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-17 Max Hopkins , Daniel Kane , Shachar Lovett , Gaurav Mahajan

The problem of state tracking with active observation control is considered for a system modeled by a discrete-time, finite-state Markov chain observed through conditionally Gaussian measurement vectors. The measurement model statistics are…

Systems and Control · Computer Science 2015-06-18 Daphney-Stavroula Zois , Marco Levorato , Urbashi Mitra

The goal of a traditional Markov decision process (MDP) is to maximize expected cumulative reward over a defined horizon (possibly infinite). In many applications, however, a decision maker may be interested in optimizing a specific…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-16 Xiaocheng Li , Huaiyang Zhong , Margaret L. Brandeau