Related papers: A reinforcement learning based decision support sy…
Current work in explainable reinforcement learning generally produces policies in the form of a decision tree over the state space. Such policies can be used for formal safety verification, agent behavior prediction, and manual inspection…
Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) have been used to formulate many decision-making problems in science and engineering. The objective is to synthesize the best decision (action selection) policies to maximize expected rewards (or minimize…
This paper addresses the problem of learning control policies for mobile robots, modeled as unknown Markov Decision Processes (MDPs), that are tasked with temporal logic missions, such as sequencing, coverage, or surveillance. The MDP…
We consider a new form of reinforcement learning (RL) that is based on opportunities to directly learn the optimal control policy and a general Markov decision process (MDP) framework devised to support these opportunities. Derivations of…
In this paper we consider the problem of how a reinforcement learning agent that is tasked with solving a sequence of reinforcement learning problems (a sequence of Markov decision processes) can use knowledge acquired early in its lifetime…
Learning a near optimal policy in a partially observable system remains an elusive challenge in contemporary reinforcement learning. In this work, we consider episodic reinforcement learning in a reward-mixing Markov decision process (MDP).…
Safe reinforcement learning has been a promising approach for optimizing the policy of an agent that operates in safety-critical applications. In this paper, we propose an algorithm, SNO-MDP, that explores and optimizes Markov decision…
We introduce Threatened Markov Decision Processes (TMDPs) as an extension of the classical Markov Decision Process framework for Reinforcement Learning (RL). TMDPs allow suporting a decision maker against potential opponents in a RL…
Tensor network (TN) techniques - often used in the context of quantum many-body physics - have shown promise as a tool for tackling machine learning (ML) problems. The application of TNs to ML, however, has mostly focused on supervised and…
Personalization in machine learning (ML) tailors models' decisions to the individual characteristics of users. While this approach has seen success in areas like recommender systems, its expansion into high-stakes fields such as healthcare…
Transferring knowledge across a sequence of related tasks is an important challenge in reinforcement learning (RL). Despite much encouraging empirical evidence, there has been little theoretical analysis. In this paper, we study a class of…
While reinforcement learning has been increasingly applied to stochastic control, few studies have systematically examined policy-based methods in queuing environments modeled as a semi-Markov decision process (SMDP). To address this gap,…
To overcome the curse of dimensionality and curse of modeling in Dynamic Programming (DP) methods for solving classical Markov Decision Process (MDP) problems, Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms are popular. In this paper, we consider…
This work proposes an approach that integrates reinforcement learning and model predictive control (MPC) to solve finite-horizon optimal control problems in mixed-logical dynamical systems efficiently. Optimization-based control of such…
In practical applications, we can rarely assume full observability of a system's environment, despite such knowledge being important for determining a reactive control system's precise interaction with its environment. Therefore, we propose…
One major limitation to the applicability of Reinforcement Learning (RL) to many practical domains is the large number of samples required to learn an optimal policy. To address this problem and improve learning efficiency, we consider a…
Training reinforcement learning (RL) agents using scalar reward signals is often infeasible when an environment has sparse and non-Markovian rewards. Moreover, handcrafting these reward functions before training is prone to…
In this paper we consider the problem of how a reinforcement learning agent tasked with solving a set of related Markov decision processes can use knowledge acquired early in its lifetime to improve its ability to more rapidly solve novel,…
We propose a new reinforcement learning algorithm for partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDP) based on spectral decomposition methods. While spectral methods have been previously employed for consistent learning of (passive)…
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…