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Related papers: Reinforcement Learning with Non-Markovian Rewards

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An in-depth understanding of the particular environment is crucial in reinforcement learning (RL). To address this challenge, the decision-making process of a mobile collaborative robotic assistant modeled by the Markov decision process…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-29 Mónika Farsang , Luca Szegletes

Finding optimal policies which maximize long term rewards of Markov Decision Processes requires the use of dynamic programming and backward induction to solve the Bellman optimality equation. However, many real-world problems require…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-10 Mridul Agarwal , Vaneet Aggarwal

Many Reinforcement Learning algorithms assume a Markov reward function to guarantee optimality. However, not all reward functions are Markov. This paper proposes a framework for mapping non-Markov reward functions into equivalent Markov…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-19 Gregory Hyde , Eugene Santos

A Markov Decision Process (MDP) is a popular model for reinforcement learning. However, its commonly used assumption of stationary dynamics and rewards is too stringent and fails to hold in adversarial, nonstationary, or multi-agent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-08-22 Tiancheng Yu , Suvrit Sra

Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) describes the problem of learning an unknown reward function of a Markov Decision Process (MDP) from observed behavior of an agent. Since the agent's behavior originates in its policy and MDP policies…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2016-04-14 Michael Herman , Tobias Gindele , Jörg Wagner , Felix Schmitt , Wolfram Burgard

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a technique to learn the control policy for an agent that interacts with a stochastic environment. In any given state, the agent takes some action, and the environment determines the probability distribution…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-30 Gaurav Gupta , Chenzhong Yin , Jyotirmoy V. Deshmukh , Paul Bogdan

To overcome the curses of dimensionality and modeling of Dynamic Programming (DP) methods to solve Markov Decision Process (MDP) problems, Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods are adopted in practice. Contrary to traditional RL algorithms…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-08-24 Arghyadip Roy , Vivek Borkar , Abhay Karandikar , Prasanna Chaporkar

Training reinforcement learning (RL) agents using scalar reward signals is often infeasible when an environment has sparse and non-Markovian rewards. Moreover, handcrafting these reward functions before training is prone to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-04 Alessandro Abate , Yousif Almulla , James Fox , David Hyland , Michael Wooldridge

Unlike traditional reinforcement learning (RL), market-based RL is in principle applicable to worlds described by partially observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs), where an agent needs to learn short-term memories of relevant…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2007-05-23 Ivo Kwee , Marcus Hutter , Juergen Schmidhuber

Reinforcement learning usually assumes a given or sometimes even fixed environment in which an agent seeks an optimal policy to maximize its long-term discounted reward. In contrast, we consider agents that are not limited to passive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-20 Ziqing Lu , Babak Hassibi , Lifeng Lai , Weiyu Xu

Model-based Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a popular learning paradigm due to its potential sample efficiency compared to model-free RL. However, existing empirical model-based RL approaches lack the ability to explore. This work studies a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-16 Yuda Song , Wen Sun

We generalise the problem of reward modelling (RM) for reinforcement learning (RL) to handle non-Markovian rewards. Existing work assumes that human evaluators observe each step in a trajectory independently when providing feedback on agent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-11 Joseph Early , Tom Bewley , Christine Evers , Sarvapali Ramchurn

Reward-free reinforcement learning (RL) considers the setting where the agent does not have access to a reward function during exploration, but must propose a near-optimal policy for an arbitrary reward function revealed only after…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-22 Andrew Wagenmaker , Yifang Chen , Max Simchowitz , Simon S. Du , Kevin Jamieson

A common setting of reinforcement learning (RL) is a Markov decision process (MDP) in which the environment is a stochastic discrete-time dynamical system. Whereas MDPs are suitable in such applications as video-games or puzzles, physical…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-11-29 Pavel Osinenko , Dmitrii Dobriborsci , Grigory Yaremenko , Georgiy Malaniya

A tenet of reinforcement learning is that the agent always observes rewards. However, this is not true in many realistic settings, e.g., a human observer may not always be available to provide rewards, sensors may be limited or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Alireza Kazemipour , Simone Parisi , Matthew E. Taylor , Michael Bowling

Reinforcement learning in non-stationary environments is challenging due to abrupt and unpredictable changes in dynamics, often causing traditional algorithms to fail to converge. However, in many real-world cases, non-stationarity has some…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-25 Mohsen Amiri , Sindri Magnússon

In this paper, we consider reinforcement learning of Markov Decision Processes (MDP) with peak constraints, where an agent chooses a policy to optimize an objective and at the same time satisfy additional constraints. The agent has to take…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-12-09 Ather Gattami

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has gained substantial attention across diverse application domains and theoretical investigations. Existing literature on RL theory largely focuses on risk-neutral settings where the decision-maker learns to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-24 Zhengqi Wu , Renyuan Xu

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a classical tool to solve network control or policy optimization problems in unknown environments. The original Q-learning suffers from performance and complexity challenges across very large networks. Herein,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-02 Talha Bozkus , Urbashi Mitra

Several real-world scenarios, such as remote control and sensing, are comprised of action and observation delays. The presence of delays degrades the performance of reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms, often to such an extent that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-08-18 Somjit Nath , Mayank Baranwal , Harshad Khadilkar