English
Related papers

Related papers: Learning Discrete State Abstractions With Deep Var…

200 papers

Efficient planning in continuous state and action spaces is fundamentally hard, even when the transition model is deterministic and known. One way to alleviate this challenge is to perform bilevel planning with abstractions, where a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-05-28 Tom Silver , Rohan Chitnis , Nishanth Kumar , Willie McClinton , Tomas Lozano-Perez , Leslie Pack Kaelbling , Joshua Tenenbaum

Decision making via sequence modeling aims to mimic the success of language models, where actions taken by an embodied agent are modeled as tokens to predict. Despite their promising performance, it remains unclear if embodied sequence…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-08 Tian Yun , Zilai Zeng , Kunal Handa , Ashish V. Thapliyal , Bo Pang , Ellie Pavlick , Chen Sun

In the face of difficult exploration problems in reinforcement learning, we study whether giving an agent an object-centric mapping (describing a set of items and their attributes) allow for more efficient learning. We found this problem is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-15 Anthony GX-Chen , Kenneth Marino , Rob Fergus

Robust reinforcement learning agents using high-dimensional observations must be able to identify relevant state features amidst many exogeneous distractors. A representation that captures controllability identifies these state elements by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-25 Max Rudolph , Caleb Chuck , Kevin Black , Misha Lvovsky , Scott Niekum , Amy Zhang

Decision-making in complex, continuous multi-task environments is often hindered by the difficulty of obtaining accurate models for planning and the inefficiency of learning purely from trial and error. While precise environment dynamics…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-20 Jeff Jewett , Sandhya Saisubramanian

In this paper, we present a novel approach to incrementally learn an Abstract Model of an unknown environment, and show how an agent can reuse the learned model for tackling the Object Goal Navigation task. The Abstract Model is a finite…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-03-08 Tommaso Campari , Leonardo Lamanna , Paolo Traverso , Luciano Serafini , Lamberto Ballan

Finite-state abstractions (a.k.a. symbolic models) present a promising avenue for the formal verification and synthesis of controllers in continuous-space control systems. These abstractions provide simplified models that capture the…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-02-25 Daniel Ajeleye , Majid Zamani

Many control tasks exhibit similar dynamics that can be modeled as having common latent structure. Hidden-Parameter Markov Decision Processes (HiP-MDPs) explicitly model this structure to improve sample efficiency in multi-task settings.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-15 Amy Zhang , Shagun Sodhani , Khimya Khetarpal , Joelle Pineau

Real-world sequential decision-making often involves parameterized action spaces that require both, decisions regarding discrete actions and decisions about continuous action parameters governing how an action is executed. Existing…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-27 Rashmeet Kaur Nayyar , Naman Shah , Siddharth Srivastava

Imitation learning is a popular method for teaching robots new behaviors. However, most existing methods focus on teaching short, isolated skills rather than long, multi-step tasks. To bridge this gap, imitation learning algorithms must not…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-11-04 Leon Keller , Daniel Tanneberg , Jan Peters

We study how representation learning can accelerate reinforcement learning from rich observations, such as images, without relying either on domain knowledge or pixel-reconstruction. Our goal is to learn representations that both provide…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-08 Amy Zhang , Rowan McAllister , Roberto Calandra , Yarin Gal , Sergey Levine

The Bayes-Adaptive Markov Decision Process (BAMDP) formalism pursues the Bayes-optimal solution to the exploration-exploitation trade-off in reinforcement learning. As the computation of exact solutions to Bayesian reinforcement-learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-01 Dilip Arumugam , Satinder Singh

Abstraction is a desirable capability for deep learning models, which means to induce abstract concepts from concrete instances and flexibly apply them beyond the learning context. At the same time, there is a lack of clear understanding…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-24 Shengnan An , Zeqi Lin , Bei Chen , Qiang Fu , Nanning Zheng , Jian-Guang Lou

We present a new behavioural distance over the state space of a Markov decision process, and demonstrate the use of this distance as an effective means of shaping the learnt representations of deep reinforcement learning agents. While…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-25 Pablo Samuel Castro , Tyler Kastner , Prakash Panangaden , Mark Rowland

Learning dynamics models accurately is an important goal for Model-Based Reinforcement Learning (MBRL), but most MBRL methods learn a dense dynamics model which is vulnerable to spurious correlations and therefore generalizes poorly to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-28 Zizhao Wang , Xuesu Xiao , Zifan Xu , Yuke Zhu , Peter Stone

Abstraction plays an important role in the generalisation of knowledge and skills and is key to sample efficient learning. In this work, we study joint temporal and state abstraction in reinforcement learning, where temporally-extended…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-09 Dongge Han , Sebastian Tschiatschek

We present a methodology for formulating simplifying abstractions in machine learning systems by identifying and harnessing the utility structure of decisions. Machine learning tasks commonly involve high-dimensional output spaces (e.g.,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-31 Michael Poli , Stefano Massaroli , Stefano Ermon , Bryan Wilder , Eric Horvitz

Learning agents with reinforcement learning is difficult when dealing with long trajectories that involve a large number of states. To address these learning problems effectively, the number of states can be reduced by abstract…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-02 Vihang Patil , Markus Hofmarcher , Elisabeth Rumetshofer , Sepp Hochreiter

A key competence for open-ended learning is the formation of increasingly abstract representations useful for driving complex behavior. Abstract representations ignore specific details and facilitate generalization. Here we consider the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-06 Charles Wilmot , Gianluca Baldassarre , Jochen Triesch

Due to information asymmetry, finding optimal policies for Decentralized Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (Dec-POMDPs) is hard with the complexity growing doubly exponentially in the horizon length. The challenge increases…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-26 Hsu Kao , Vijay Subramanian