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We present a framework to address a class of sequential decision making problems. Our framework features learning the optimal control policy with robustness to noisy data, determining the unknown state and action parameters, and performing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-20 Amber Srivastava , Srinivasa M Salapaka

We propose novel classical and quantum online algorithms for learning finite-horizon and infinite-horizon average-reward Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). Our algorithms are based on a hybrid exploration-generative reinforcement learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-12 Andris Ambainis , Joao F. Doriguello , Debbie Lim

We study the problem of learning safe control policies that are also effective; i.e., maximizing the probability of satisfying a linear temporal logic (LTL) specification of a task, and the discounted reward capturing the (classic) control…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-04-07 Alper Kamil Bozkurt , Yu Wang , Miroslav Pajic

This paper aims to establish an entropy-regularized value-based reinforcement learning method that can ensure the monotonic improvement of policies at each policy update. Unlike previously proposed lower-bounds on policy improvement in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-26 Lingwei Zhu , Takamitsu Matsubara

We study the problem of learning policies that maximize cumulative reward while satisfying safety constraints, even when the real environment differs from a simulator or nominal model. We focus on robust constrained Markov decision…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-12 Sourav Ganguly , Arnob Ghosh

Robust Markov decision processes (MDPs) address the challenge of model uncertainty by optimizing the worst-case performance over an uncertainty set of MDPs. In this paper, we focus on the robust average-reward MDPs under the model-free…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-19 Yue Wang , Alvaro Velasquez , George Atia , Ashley Prater-Bennette , Shaofeng Zou

Recursion is the fundamental paradigm to finitely describe potentially infinite objects. As state-of-the-art reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms cannot directly reason about recursion, they must rely on the practitioner's ingenuity in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-24 Ernst Moritz Hahn , Mateo Perez , Sven Schewe , Fabio Somenzi , Ashutosh Trivedi , Dominik Wojtczak

In order to make good decision under uncertainty an agent must learn from observations. To do so, two of the most common frameworks are Contextual Bandits and Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). In this paper, we study whether there exist…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-05 Andrea Zanette , Emma Brunskill

One of the fundamental challenges associated with reinforcement learning (RL) is that collecting sufficient data can be both time-consuming and expensive. In this paper, we formalize a concept of time reversal symmetry in a Markov decision…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-29 Brett Barkley , Amy Zhang , David Fridovich-Keil

Action delays degrade the performance of reinforcement learning in many real-world systems. This paper proposes a formal definition of delay-aware Markov Decision Process and proves it can be transformed into standard MDP with augmented…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-10 Baiming Chen , Mengdi Xu , Liang Li , Ding Zhao

We present an optimization-based framework for robust permissive synthesis for Interval Markov Decision Processes (IMDPs), motivated by robotic decision-making under transition uncertainty. In many robotic systems, model inaccuracies and…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Khang Vo Huynh , David Parker , Lu Feng

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a widely employed machine learning architecture that has been applied to a variety of control problems. However, applications in safety-critical domains require a systematic and formal approach to specifying…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-07 Hosein Hasanbeig , Daniel Kroening , Alessandro Abate

Controllers trained with Reinforcement Learning tend to be very specialized and thus generalize poorly when their testing environment differs from their training one. We propose a Model-Based approach to increase generalization where both…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-15 Valentin Charvet , Sebastian Stein , Roderick Murray-Smith

We investigate model-based reinforcement learning in contextual Markov decision processes (C-MDPs) in which the context is unobserved and induces confounding in the offline dataset. In such settings, conventional model-learning methods are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-09 Nishanth Venkatesh , Andreas A. Malikopoulos

Interval Markov Decision Processes (IMDPs) are finite-state uncertain Markov models, where the transition probabilities belong to intervals. Recently, there has been a surge of research on employing IMDPs as abstractions of stochastic…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-02-18 Giannis Delimpaltadakis , Morteza Lahijanian , Manuel Mazo , Luca Laurenti

Model-based reinforcement learning (RL) is appealing because (i) it enables planning and thus more strategic exploration, and (ii) by decoupling dynamics from rewards, it enables fast transfer to new reward functions. However, learning an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-14 Evan Zheran Liu , Ramtin Keramati , Sudarshan Seshadri , Kelvin Guu , Panupong Pasupat , Emma Brunskill , Percy Liang

In this paper, we propose a compositional approach for the construction of finite abstractions (a.k.a. finite Markov decision processes (MDPs)) for networks of discrete-time stochastic control subsystems that are not necessarily…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2020-02-12 Abolfazl Lavaei , Sadegh Soudjani , Majid Zamani

This paper studies a finite-horizon Markov decision problem with information-theoretic constraints, where the goal is to minimize directed information from the controlled source process to the control process, subject to stage-wise cost…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-09-04 Zixuan He , Charalambos D. Charalambous , Photios A. Stavrou

Recent advances in reinforcement learning (RL) enable its use on increasingly complex tasks, but the lack of formal safety guarantees still limits its application in safety-critical settings. A common practical approach is to augment the RL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-12 Donggeon David Oh , Duy P. Nguyen , Haimin Hu , Jaime F. Fisac

Controllers for dynamical systems that operate in safety-critical settings must account for stochastic disturbances. Such disturbances are often modeled as process noise in a dynamical system, and common assumptions are that the underlying…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-01-24 Thom Badings , Licio Romao , Alessandro Abate , David Parker , Hasan A. Poonawala , Marielle Stoelinga , Nils Jansen