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Temporal difference learning (TD) is a simple iterative algorithm used to estimate the value function corresponding to a given policy in a Markov decision process. Although TD is one of the most widely used algorithms in reinforcement…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-11-07 Jalaj Bhandari , Daniel Russo , Raghav Singal

Linear Temporal Logic (LTL) offers a precise means for constraining the behavior of reinforcement learning agents. However, in many settings where both satisfaction and optimality conditions are present, LTL is insufficient to capture both.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-26 Ameesh Shah , Cameron Voloshin , Chenxi Yang , Abhinav Verma , Swarat Chaudhuri , Sanjit A. Seshia

This paper addresses the problem of learning optimal control policies for systems with uncertain dynamics and high-level control objectives specified as Linear Temporal Logic (LTL) formulas. Uncertainty is considered in the workspace…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-10-17 Yiannis Kantaros , Jun Wang

In this work we present a novel approach to hierarchical reinforcement learning for linearly-solvable Markov decision processes. Our approach assumes that the state space is partitioned, and the subtasks consist in moving between the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-04 Guillermo Infante , Anders Jonsson , Vicenç Gómez

A promising way to improve the sample efficiency of reinforcement learning is model-based methods, in which many explorations and evaluations can happen in the learned models to save real-world samples. However, when the learned model has a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-14 Haoxin Lin , Yihao Sun , Jiaji Zhang , Yang Yu

This study addresses the challenges of dynamics and complexity in intelligent human-computer interaction and proposes a reinforcement learning-based optimization framework to improve long-term returns and overall experience. Human-computer…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2025-11-03 Rui Liu , Yifan Zhuang , Runsheng Zhang

Reinforcement learning (RL) agents have traditionally been tasked with maximizing the value function of a Markov decision process (MDP), either in continuous settings, with fixed discount factor $\gamma < 1$, or in episodic settings, with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-02-11 Silviu Pitis

We study the problem of efficient exploration in order to learn an accurate model of an environment, modeled as a Markov decision process (MDP). Efficient exploration in this problem requires the agent to identify the regions in which…

We consider the problem of learning an $\varepsilon$-optimal policy in controlled dynamical systems with low-rank latent structure. For this problem, we present LoRa-PI (Low-Rank Policy Iteration), a model-free learning algorithm…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-12 Stefan Stojanovic , Yassir Jedra , Alexandre Proutiere

This paper presents an approach for accelerated learning of optimal plans for a given task represented using Linear Temporal Logic (LTL) in multi-agent systems. Given a set of options (temporally abstract actions) available to each agent,…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2025-10-29 Nishant Doshi

Given a dataset on actions and resulting long-term rewards, a direct estimation approach fits value functions that minimize prediction error on the training data. Temporal difference learning (TD) methods instead fit value functions by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-15 David Cheikhi , Daniel Russo

In many practical sequential decision-making problems, tracking the state of the environment incurs a sensing/communication/computation cost. In these settings, the agent's interaction with its environment includes the additional component…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-16 Vansh Kapoor , Jayakrishnan Nair

We study a new model-free algorithm to compute $\varepsilon$-optimal policies for average reward Markov decision processes, in the weakly communicating case. Given a generative model, our procedure combines a recursive sampling technique…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-06-16 Jongmin Lee , Mario Bravo , Roberto Cominetti

We establish a connection between policy evaluation in Markov decision processes and PageRank in network analysis. For a fixed policy, we show that the value function of a discounted Markov decision process can be obtained, up to an…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-05-04 Konstantin Avrachenkov , Lorenzo Gregoris , Nelly Litvak

In human-in-the-loop reinforcement learning or environments where calculating a reward is expensive, the costly rewards can make learning efficiency challenging to achieve. The cost of obtaining feedback from humans or calculating expensive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-03 Muhammed Yusuf Satici , David L. Roberts

We consider the problem of imitation learning from a finite set of expert trajectories, without access to reinforcement signals. The classical approach of extracting the expert's reward function via inverse reinforcement learning, followed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-10 Ruohan Wang , Carlo Ciliberto , Pierluigi Amadori , Yiannis Demiris

Reward-free reinforcement learning (RL) is a framework which is suitable for both the batch RL setting and the setting where there are many reward functions of interest. During the exploration phase, an agent collects samples without using…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-22 Ruosong Wang , Simon S. Du , Lin F. Yang , Ruslan Salakhutdinov

State abstraction has been an essential tool for dramatically improving the sample efficiency of reinforcement-learning algorithms. Indeed, by exposing and accentuating various types of latent structure within the environment, different…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-18 Dilip Arumugam , Benjamin Van Roy

We consider a distributed setup for reinforcement learning, where each agent has a copy of the same Markov Decision Process but transitions are sampled from the corresponding Markov chain independently by each agent. We show that in this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-04 Haoxing Tian , Ioannis Ch. Paschalidis , Alex Olshevsky

We propose a new simple and natural algorithm for learning the optimal Q-value function of a discounted-cost Markov Decision Process (MDP) when the transition kernels are unknown. Unlike the classical learning algorithms for MDPs, such as…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-01-31 Dileep Kalathil , Vivek S. Borkar , Rahul Jain