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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

While reinforcement learning has achieved remarkable successes in several domains, its real-world application is limited due to many methods failing to generalise to unfamiliar conditions. In this work, we consider the problem of…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-10-26 Michael Beukman , Devon Jarvis , Richard Klein , Steven James , Benjamin Rosman

The automated synthesis of control policies for stochastic dynamical systems presents significant challenges. A standard approach is to construct a finite-state abstraction of the continuous system, typically represented as a Markov…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-08-26 Mahdi Nazeri , Thom Badings , Sadegh Soudjani , Alessandro Abate

The study of causal abstractions bridges two integral components of human intelligence: the ability to determine cause and effect, and the ability to interpret complex patterns into abstract concepts. Formally, causal abstraction frameworks…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-29 Kevin Xia , Elias Bareinboim

One method for obtaining generalizable solutions to machine learning tasks when presented with diverse training environments is to find \textit{invariant representations} of the data. These are representations of the covariates such that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-16 Advait Parulekar , Karthikeyan Shanmugam , Sanjay Shakkottai

We study the automated abstraction-based synthesis of correct-by-construction control policies for stochastic dynamical systems with unknown dynamics. Our approach is to learn an abstraction from sampled data, which is represented in the…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-09-03 Mahdi Nazeri , Thom Badings , Anne-Kathrin Schmuck , Sadegh Soudjani , Alessandro Abate

Learning policies that effectively utilize language instructions in complex, multi-task environments is an important problem in sequential decision-making. While it is possible to condition on the entire language instruction directly, such…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-07 Divyansh Garg , Skanda Vaidyanath , Kuno Kim , Jiaming Song , Stefano Ermon

The need for modelling causal knowledge at different levels of granularity arises in several settings. Causal Abstraction provides a framework for formalizing this problem by relating two Structural Causal Models at different levels of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-04 Riccardo Massidda , Sara Magliacane , Davide Bacciu

We present a general framework for applying learning algorithms and heuristical guidance to the verification of Markov decision processes (MDPs). The primary goal of our techniques is to improve performance by avoiding an exhaustive…

While the difficulty of reinforcement learning problems is typically related to the complexity of their state spaces, Abstraction proposes that solutions often lie in simpler underlying latent spaces. Prior works have focused on learning…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-10-19 Amnon Attali , Pedro Cisneros-Velarde , Marco Morales , Nancy M. Amato

General purpose intelligent learning agents cycle through (complex,non-MDP) sequences of observations, actions, and rewards. On the other hand, reinforcement learning is well-developed for small finite state Markov Decision Processes…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2009-12-30 Marcus Hutter

A challenge in multi-agent reinforcement learning is to be able to generalize over intractable state-action spaces. Inspired from Tesseract [Mahajan et al., 2021], this position paper investigates generalisation in state-action space over…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-28 Pascal Van Der Vaart , Anuj Mahajan , Shimon Whiteson

Reinforcement learning agents must painstakingly learn through trial and error what sets of state-action pairs are value equivalent -- requiring an often prohibitively large amount of environment experience. MDP homomorphisms have been…

Our work aims at developing reinforcement learning algorithms that do not rely on the Markov assumption. We consider the class of Non-Markov Decision Processes where histories can be abstracted into a finite set of states while preserving…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-19 Alessandro Ronca , Gabriel Paludo Licks , Giuseppe De Giacomo

Machine learning models rely on various assumptions to attain high accuracy. One of the preliminary assumptions of these models is the independent and identical distribution, which suggests that the train and test data are sampled from the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-08 Paras Sheth , Raha Moraffah , K. Selçuk Candan , Adrienne Raglin , Huan Liu

Finite-state abstractions are widely studied for the automated synthesis of correct-by-construction controllers for stochastic dynamical systems. However, existing abstraction methods often lead to prohibitively large finite-state models.…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-04-03 Thom Badings , Licio Romao , Alessandro Abate , Nils Jansen

Reinforcement learning defines the problem facing agents that learn to make good decisions through action and observation alone. To be effective problem solvers, such agents must efficiently explore vast worlds, assign credit from delayed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-02 David Abel

In the quest for efficient and robust reinforcement learning methods, both model-free and model-based approaches offer advantages. In this paper we propose a new way of explicitly bridging both approaches via a shared low-dimensional…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-11-20 Vincent François-Lavet , Yoshua Bengio , Doina Precup , Joelle Pineau

Learning-based approaches to verifying unknown Markov decision processes (MDPs) often employ uncertain MDPs. These models use, for example, confidence intervals to capture transition uncertainty and allow synthesis of policies that are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Yannik Schnitzer , Alessandro Abate , David Parker

Non-stationary environments are challenging for reinforcement learning algorithms. If the state transition and/or reward functions change based on latent factors, the agent is effectively tasked with optimizing a behavior that maximizes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-21 Lucas N. Alegre , Ana L. C. Bazzan , Bruno C. da Silva