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Related papers: Inverse Reinforcement Learning in Contextual MDPs

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We study learning contextual MDPs using a function approximation for both the rewards and the dynamics. We consider both the case that the dynamics dependent or independent of the context. For both models we derive polynomial sample and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-01 Orin Levy , Yishay Mansour

Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) is used to infer the reward function from the actions of an expert running a Markov Decision Process (MDP). A novel approach using variational inference for learning the reward function is proposed in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-03 Arpan Kusari

Deploying reinforcement learning policies in the real world requires adapting to time-varying environments. We study this problem in the contextual Markov Decision Process (cMDP) framework, where a family of environments is indexed by a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-04 Param Budhraja , Aditya Gangrade , Alex Olshevsky , Venkatesh Saligrama

Learning Markov decision processes (MDPs) in the presence of the adversary is a challenging problem in reinforcement learning (RL). In this paper, we study RL in episodic MDPs with adversarial reward and full information feedback, where the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-21 Jiafan He , Dongruo Zhou , Quanquan Gu

Robust Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) address environmental shift through distributionally robust optimization (DRO) by finding an optimal worst-case policy within an uncertainty set of transition kernels. However, standard DRO approaches…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-10 Akram S. Awad , Shihab Ahmed , Yue Wang , George K. Atia

We study reinforcement learning for continuous-time Markov decision processes (MDPs) in the finite-horizon episodic setting. In contrast to discrete-time MDPs, the inter-transition times of a continuous-time MDP are exponentially…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-04 Xuefeng Gao , Xun Yu Zhou

We investigate the ability of transformers to perform in-context reinforcement learning (ICRL), where a model must infer and execute learning algorithms from trajectory data without parameter updates. We show that a linear self-attention…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-08 Haodong Liang , Lifeng Lai

Humans and animals show remarkable learning efficiency, adapting to new environments with minimal experience. This capability is not well captured by standard reinforcement learning algorithms that rely on incremental value updates. Rapid…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-03 Ching Fang , Kanaka Rajan

Modern tasks in reinforcement learning have large state and action spaces. To deal with them efficiently, one often uses predefined feature mapping to represent states and actions in a low-dimensional space. In this paper, we study…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-24 Dongruo Zhou , Jiafan He , Quanquan Gu

We study the problem of federated stochastic multi-arm contextual bandits with unknown contexts, in which M agents are faced with different bandits and collaborate to learn. The communication model consists of a central server and the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-31 Jiabin Lin , Shana Moothedath

Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) techniques deal with the problem of deducing a reward function that explains the behavior of an expert agent who is assumed to act optimally in an underlying unknown task. In several problems of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-09 Riccardo Poiani , Gabriele Curti , Alberto Maria Metelli , Marcello Restelli

Exploration in complex domains is a key challenge in reinforcement learning, especially for tasks with very sparse rewards. Recent successes in deep reinforcement learning have been achieved mostly using simple heuristic exploration…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-03-07 Joshua Achiam , Shankar Sastry

Traditional reinforcement learning (RL) aims to maximize the expected total reward, while the risk of uncertain outcomes needs to be controlled to ensure reliable performance in a risk-averse setting. In this paper, we consider the problem…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-18 Xian Yu , Siqian Shen

To achieve sample efficiency in reinforcement learning (RL), it necessitates efficiently exploring the underlying environment. Under the offline setting, addressing the exploration challenge lies in collecting an offline dataset with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-15 Shuang Qiu , Jieping Ye , Zhaoran Wang , Zhuoran Yang

The aim of multi-task reinforcement learning is two-fold: (1) efficiently learn by training against multiple tasks and (2) quickly adapt, using limited samples, to a variety of new tasks. In this work, the tasks correspond to reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-05 Nicholas C. Landolfi , Garrett Thomas , Tengyu Ma

Reinforcement learning is a promising framework for solving control problems, but its use in practical situations is hampered by the fact that reward functions are often difficult to engineer. Specifying goals and tasks for autonomous…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-02-22 Justin Fu , Anoop Korattikara , Sergey Levine , Sergio Guadarrama

When robots enter everyday human environments, they need to understand their tasks and how they should perform those tasks. To encode these, reward functions, which specify the objective of a robot, are employed. However, designing reward…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-10-21 Erdem Bıyık

Multi-objective Markov decision processes are sequential decision-making problems that involve multiple conflicting reward functions that cannot be optimized simultaneously without a compromise. This type of problems cannot be solved by a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-22 Sherif Abdelfattah , Kathryn Merrick , Jiankun Hu

We introduce a novel method for multilingual transfer that utilizes deep contextual embeddings, pretrained in an unsupervised fashion. While contextual embeddings have been shown to yield richer representations of meaning compared to their…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-04-05 Tal Schuster , Ori Ram , Regina Barzilay , Amir Globerson

Optimal decision making with limited or no information in stochastic environments where multiple agents interact is a challenging topic in the realm of artificial intelligence. Reinforcement learning (RL) is a popular approach for arriving…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-01-08 Roi Ceren