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Related papers: Invariant Causal Prediction for Block MDPs

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Reinforcement learning (RL) on high-dimensional and complex problems relies on abstraction for improved efficiency and generalization. In this paper, we study abstraction in the continuous-control setting, and extend the definition of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-08 Prakash Panangaden , Sahand Rezaei-Shoshtari , Rosie Zhao , David Meger , Doina Precup

A compact information-rich representation of the environment, also called a feature abstraction, can simplify a robot's task of mapping its raw sensory inputs to useful action sequences. However, in environments that are non-stationary and…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-01-18 Varun Raj Kompella , Laurenz Wiskott

Learning models that can handle distribution shifts is a key challenge in domain generalization. Invariance learning, an approach that focuses on identifying features invariant across environments, improves model generalization by capturing…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-11 Yiran Jia , Jelena Bradic

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…

We investigate the problems of model estimation and reward-free learning in episodic Block MDPs. In these MDPs, the decision maker has access to rich observations or contexts generated from a small number of latent states. We are first…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-27 Yassir Jedra , Junghyun Lee , Alexandre Proutière , Se-Young Yun

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

Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) often exhibit significant redundancy due to symmetries and shared structure across state-goal pairs in real-world Goal-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning (GCRL). While hierarchical policies have been…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Clarisse Wibault , Alexander Goldie , Antonio Villares , Maike Osborne , Jakob Foerster

General-purpose, intelligent, learning agents cycle through sequences of observations, actions, and rewards that are complex, uncertain, unknown, and non-Markovian. On the other hand, reinforcement learning is well-developed for small…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2009-12-30 Marcus Hutter

We describe a framework for using natural language to design state abstractions for imitation learning. Generalizable policy learning in high-dimensional observation spaces is facilitated by well-designed state representations, which can…

Markov decision processes are a ubiquitous formalism for modelling systems with non-deterministic and probabilistic behavior. Verification of these models is subject to the famous state space explosion problem. We alleviate this problem by…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-06-07 Sebastian Junges , Matthijs T. J. Spaan

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

We address the problem of reinforcement learning in which observations may exhibit an arbitrary form of stochastic dependence on past observations and actions, i.e. environments more general than (PO)MDPs. The task for an agent is to attain…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2009-12-30 Daniil Ryabko , Marcus Hutter

Learning from demonstrations is a common way for users to teach robots, but it is prone to spurious feature correlations. Recent work constructs state abstractions, i.e. visual representations containing task-relevant features, from…

The concept of abstraction has been independently developed both in the context of AI Planning and discounted Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). However, the way abstractions are built and used in the context of Planning and MDPs is…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-12-04 Giuseppe Canonaco , Alberto Pozanco , Daniel Borrajo

Group symmetries provide a powerful inductive bias for reinforcement learning (RL), enabling efficient generalization across symmetric states and actions via group-invariant Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). However, real-world environments…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-12 Junwoo Chang , Minwoo Park , Joohwan Seo , Roberto Horowitz , Jongmin Lee , Jongeun Choi

It has become increasingly common nowadays to collect observations of feature and response pairs from different environments. As a consequence, one has to apply learned predictors to data with a different distribution due to distribution…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-10-31 Kang Du , Yu Xiang

The generalization of model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) methods to environments with unseen transition dynamics is an important yet challenging problem. Existing methods try to extract environment-specified information $Z$ from past…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-10 Jixian Guo , Mingming Gong , Dacheng Tao

A crucial aspect in reliable machine learning is to design a deployable system in generalizing new related but unobserved environments. Domain generalization aims to alleviate such a prediction gap between the observed and unseen…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-01 Changjian Shui , Boyu Wang , Christian Gagné

We propose a compositional approach for constructing abstractions of general Markov decision processes using approximate probabilistic relations. The abstraction framework is based on the notion of $\delta$-lifted relations, using which one…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2019-08-21 Abolfazl Lavaei , Sadegh Soudjani , Majid Zamani

According to the principle of compositional generalization, the meaning of a complex expression can be understood as a function of the meaning of its parts and of how they are combined. This principle is crucial for human language…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-03-19 Sungjun Han , Sebastian Padó