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The ability of an agent to do well in new environments is a critical aspect of intelligence. In machine learning, this ability is known as $\textit{strong}$ or $\textit{out-of-distribution}$ generalization. However, merely considering…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-09 Siyuan Guo , Jonas Wildberger , Bernhard Schölkopf

We consider a Reinforcement Learning setup where an agent interacts with an environment in observation-reward-action cycles without any (esp.\ MDP) assumptions on the environment. State aggregation and more generally feature reinforcement…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2014-07-15 Marcus Hutter

While conventional reinforcement learning focuses on designing agents that can perform one task, meta-learning aims, instead, to solve the problem of designing agents that can generalize to different tasks (e.g., environments, obstacles,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-06 Xiaowu Sun , Wael Fatnassi , Ulices Santa Cruz , Yasser Shoukry

This paper is concerned with a compositional approach for constructing both infinite (reduced-order models) and finite abstractions (a.k.a. finite Markov decision processes (MDPs)) of large-scale interconnected discrete-time stochastic…

Systems and Control · Computer Science 2020-02-17 Abolfazl Lavaei , Sadegh Soudjani , Majid Zamani

Two desiderata of reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms are the ability to learn from relatively little experience and the ability to learn policies that generalize to a range of problem specifications. In factored state spaces, one…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-08-19 Zizhao Wang , Caroline Wang , Xuesu Xiao , Yuke Zhu , Peter Stone

Discovering an informative, or agent-centric, state representation that encodes only the relevant information while discarding the irrelevant is a key challenge towards scaling reinforcement learning algorithms and efficiently applying them…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-24 Lili Wu , Ben Evans , Riashat Islam , Raihan Seraj , Yonathan Efroni , Alex Lamb

Model-based reinforcement learning (RL) enjoys several benefits, such as data-efficiency and planning, by learning a model of the environment's dynamics. However, learning a global model that can generalize across different dynamics is a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-30 Kimin Lee , Younggyo Seo , Seunghyun Lee , Honglak Lee , Jinwoo Shin

Deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) is successful in solving many complex Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) problems. However, agents often face unanticipated environmental changes after deployment in the real world. These changes are often…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-29 Beining Han , Chongyi Zheng , Harris Chan , Keiran Paster , Michael R. Zhang , Jimmy Ba

This paper proposes a formal approach to online learning and planning for agents operating in a priori unknown, time-varying environments. The proposed method computes the maximally likely model of the environment, given the observations…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-09 Melkior Ornik , Ufuk Topcu

Contextual Markov decision processes (CMDPs) describe a class of reinforcement learning problems in which the transition kernels and reward functions can change over time with different MDPs indexed by a context variable. While CMDPs serve…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-06 Junze Deng , Yuan Cheng , Shaofeng Zou , Yingbin Liang

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

We consider the problem of learning by demonstration from agents acting in unknown stochastic Markov environments or games. Our aim is to estimate agent preferences in order to construct improved policies for the same task that the agents…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2014-08-12 Aristide Tossou , Christos Dimitrakakis

We consider the problem of learning by demonstration from agents acting in unknown stochastic Markov environments or games. Our aim is to estimate agent preferences in order to construct improved policies for the same task that the agents…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2013-07-16 Aristide C. Y. Tossou , Christos Dimitrakakis

Deploying reinforcement learning policies in the real world requires adapting to time-varying environments. We study this problem in the contextual Markov Decision Process (cMDP) framework, where a family of environments is indexed by a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-04 Param Budhraja , Aditya Gangrade , Alex Olshevsky , Venkatesh Saligrama

Tasks such as social network analysis, human behavior recognition, or modeling biochemical reactions, can be solved elegantly by using the probabilistic inference framework. However, standard probabilistic inference algorithms work at a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-12-11 Stefan Lüdtke , Max Schröder , Frank Krüger , Sebastian Bader , Thomas Kirste

Reinforcement learning (RL) typically models the interaction between the agent and environment as a Markov decision process (MDP), where the rewards that guide the agent's behavior are always observable. However, in many real-world…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-05-15 Montaser Mohammedalamen , Michael Bowling

Average-reward Markov decision processes (MDPs) provide a foundational framework for sequential decision-making under uncertainty. However, average-reward MDPs have remained largely unexplored in reinforcement learning (RL) settings, with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-29 Juan Sebastian Rojas , Chi-Guhn Lee

Planning in adversarial and uncertain environments can be modeled as the problem of devising strategies in stochastic perfect information games. These games are generalizations of Markov decision processes (MDPs): there are two…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2012-07-09 Krishnendu Chatterjee , Thomas A. Henzinger , Ranjit Jhala , Rupak Majumdar

Learning representations that capture the underlying data generating process is a key problem for data efficient and robust use of neural networks. One key property for robustness which the learned representation should capture and which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-24 Mathieu Chevalley , Charlotte Bunne , Andreas Krause , Stefan Bauer

Causal Abstraction (CA) theory provides a principled framework for relating causal models that describe the same system at different levels of granularity while ensuring interventional consistency between them. Recent methods for learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-23 Yorgos Felekis , Theodoros Damoulas , Paris Giampouras