English
Related papers

Related papers: Kinematic State Abstraction and Provably Efficient…

200 papers

Reinforcement learning algorithms typically necessitate extensive exploration of the state space to find optimal policies. However, in safety-critical applications, the risks associated with such exploration can lead to catastrophic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-28 Kaustubh Mani , Vincent Mai , Charlie Gauthier , Annie Chen , Samer Nashed , Liam Paull

Partial observability is a common challenge in many reinforcement learning applications, which requires an agent to maintain memory, infer latent states, and integrate this past information into exploration. This challenge leads to a number…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-27 Chi Jin , Sham M. Kakade , Akshay Krishnamurthy , Qinghua Liu

Successful applications of reinforcement learning in real-world problems often require dealing with partially observable states. It is in general very challenging to construct and infer hidden states as they often depend on the agent's…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-11-20 Xiujun Li , Lihong Li , Jianfeng Gao , Xiaodong He , Jianshu Chen , Li Deng , Ji He

We study Reinforcement Learning for partially observable dynamical systems using function approximation. We propose a new \textit{Partially Observable Bilinear Actor-Critic framework}, that is general enough to include models such as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-27 Masatoshi Uehara , Ayush Sekhari , Jason D. Lee , Nathan Kallus , Wen Sun

We study reinforcement learning with function approximation for large-scale Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs) where the state space and observation space are large or even continuous. Particularly, we consider Hilbert…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-27 Masatoshi Uehara , Ayush Sekhari , Jason D. Lee , Nathan Kallus , Wen Sun

In the quest for efficient and robust reinforcement learning methods, both model-free and model-based approaches offer advantages. In this paper we propose a new way of explicitly bridging both approaches via a shared low-dimensional…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-11-20 Vincent François-Lavet , Yoshua Bengio , Doina Precup , Joelle Pineau

In this paper we introduce a simple approach for exploration in reinforcement learning (RL) that allows us to develop theoretically justified algorithms in the tabular case but that is also extendable to settings where function…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-27 Marlos C. Machado , Marc G. Bellemare , Michael Bowling

The exploration-exploitation dilemma in reinforcement learning (RL) is a fundamental challenge to efficient RL algorithms. Existing algorithms for finite state and action discounted RL problems address this by assuming sufficient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-09 Caleb Ju , Guanghui Lan

We introduce a new count-based optimistic exploration algorithm for Reinforcement Learning (RL) that is feasible in environments with high-dimensional state-action spaces. The success of RL algorithms in these domains depends crucially on…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-06-27 Jarryd Martin , Suraj Narayanan Sasikumar , Tom Everitt , Marcus Hutter

Intelligent agents can cope with sensory-rich environments by learning task-agnostic state abstractions. In this paper, we propose an algorithm to approximate causal states, which are the coarsest partition of the joint history of actions…

One of the challenges in online reinforcement learning (RL) is that the agent needs to trade off the exploration of the environment and the exploitation of the samples to optimize its behavior. Whether we optimize for regret, sample…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-19 Jean Tarbouriech , Matteo Pirotta , Michal Valko , Alessandro Lazaric

Reinforcement learning agents deployed in the real world often have to cope with partially observable environments. Therefore, most agents employ memory mechanisms to approximate the state of the environment. Recently, there have been…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-30 Fabian Paischer , Thomas Adler , Markus Hofmarcher , Sepp Hochreiter

Real-world applications of reinforcement learning often involve environments where agents operate on complex, high-dimensional observations, but the underlying (''latent'') dynamics are comparatively simple. However, outside of restrictive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-24 Philip Amortila , Dylan J. Foster , Nan Jiang , Akshay Krishnamurthy , Zakaria Mhammedi

High sample complexity remains a barrier to the application of reinforcement learning (RL), particularly in multi-agent systems. A large body of work has demonstrated that exploration mechanisms based on the principle of optimism under…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-08-02 Robert Loftin , Aadirupa Saha , Sam Devlin , Katja Hofmann

All reinforcement learning algorithms must handle the trade-off between exploration and exploitation. Many state-of-the-art deep reinforcement learning methods use noise in the action selection, such as Gaussian noise in policy gradient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-04-05 Trevor Barron , Oliver Obst , Heni Ben Amor

Even though reinforcement-learning-based algorithms achieved superhuman performance in many domains, the field of robotics poses significant challenges as the state and action spaces are continuous, and the reward function is predominantly…

The infamous exploration-exploitation dilemma is one of the oldest and most important problems in reinforcement learning (RL). Deliberate and effective exploration is necessary for RL agents to succeed in most environments. However, until…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-10-09 Suraj Narayanan Sasikumar

A fundamental assumption of reinforcement learning in Markov decision processes (MDPs) is that the relevant decision process is, in fact, Markov. However, when MDPs have rich observations, agents typically learn by way of an abstract state…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-18 Cameron Allen , Neev Parikh , Omer Gottesman , George Konidaris

Solving real-life sequential decision making problems under partial observability involves an exploration-exploitation problem. To be successful, an agent needs to efficiently gather valuable information about the state of the world for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-03 Haiyan Yin , Yingzhen Li , Sinno Jialin Pan , Cheng Zhang , Sebastian Tschiatschek

We consider the problem of building a state representation model in a continual fashion. As the environment changes, the aim is to efficiently compress the sensory state's information without losing past knowledge. The learned features are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-12-12 Hugo Caselles-Dupré , Michael Garcia-Ortiz , David Filliat