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We study the design of sample-efficient algorithms for reinforcement learning in the presence of rich, high-dimensional observations, formalized via the Block MDP problem. Existing algorithms suffer from either 1) computational…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-13 Zakaria Mhammedi , Dylan J. Foster , Alexander Rakhlin

A common strategy in modern learning systems is to learn a representation that is useful for many tasks, a.k.a. representation learning. We study this strategy in the imitation learning setting for Markov decision processes (MDPs) where…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-26 Sanjeev Arora , Simon S. Du , Sham Kakade , Yuping Luo , Nikunj Saunshi

We consider offline Reinforcement Learning (RL), where the agent does not interact with the environment and must rely on offline data collected using a behavior policy. Previous works provide policy evaluation guarantees when the target…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-26 Xumei Xi , Christina Lee Yu , Yudong Chen

While learning in an unknown Markov Decision Process (MDP), an agent should trade off exploration to discover new information about the MDP, and exploitation of the current knowledge to maximize the reward. Although the agent will…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-16 Evrard Garcelon , Mohammad Ghavamzadeh , Alessandro Lazaric , Matteo Pirotta

We study reward-free and reward-agnostic exploration in episodic finite-horizon Markov decision processes (MDPs), where an agent explores an unknown environment without observing external rewards. Reward-free exploration aims to enable…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-18 Oran Ridel , Alon Cohen

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-04 Alessandro Abate , Yousif Almulla , James Fox , David Hyland , Michael Wooldridge

We consider model selection for classic Reinforcement Learning (RL) environments -- Multi Armed Bandits (MABs) and Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) -- under general function approximations. In the model selection framework, we do not know…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-07-08 Avishek Ghosh , Sayak Ray Chowdhury

Model-based reinforcement learning is an effective approach for controlling an unknown system. It is based on a longstanding pipeline familiar to the control community in which one performs experiments on the environment to collect a…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-08-14 Bruce D. Lee , Ingvar Ziemann , George J. Pappas , Nikolai Matni

We study the sample complexity of model-based reinforcement learning (henceforth RL) in general contextual decision processes that require strategic exploration to find a near-optimal policy. We design new algorithms for RL with a generic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-31 Wen Sun , Nan Jiang , Akshay Krishnamurthy , Alekh Agarwal , John Langford

In this paper, we study representation learning in partially observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs), where the agent learns a decoder function that maps a series of high-dimensional raw observations to a compact representation and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-22 Jiacheng Guo , Zihao Li , Huazheng Wang , Mengdi Wang , Zhuoran Yang , Xuezhou Zhang

In many real-world decision problems there is partially observed, hidden or latent information that remains fixed throughout an interaction. Such decision problems can be modeled as Latent Markov Decision Processes (LMDPs), where a latent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-27 Jeongyeol Kwon , Shie Mannor , Constantine Caramanis , Yonathan Efroni

We study an approach to offline reinforcement learning (RL) based on optimally solving finitely-represented MDPs derived from a static dataset of experience. This approach can be applied on top of any learned representation and has the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-06 Aayam Shrestha , Stefan Lee , Prasad Tadepalli , Alan Fern

During initial iterations of training in most Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms, agents perform a significant number of random exploratory steps. In the real world, this can limit the practicality of these algorithms as it can lead to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-17 Ashish Kumar Jayant , Shalabh Bhatnagar

We study an exploration method for model-free RL that generalizes the counter-based exploration bonus methods and takes into account long term exploratory value of actions rather than a single step look-ahead. We propose a model-free RL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-09-03 Min-hwan Oh , Garud Iyengar

All reinforcement learning algorithms must handle the trade-off between exploration and exploitation. Many state-of-the-art deep reinforcement learning methods use noise in the action selection, such as Gaussian noise in policy gradient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-04-05 Trevor Barron , Oliver Obst , Heni Ben Amor

Model-free deep reinforcement learning algorithms have been shown to be capable of learning a wide range of robotic skills, but typically require a very large number of samples to achieve good performance. Model-based algorithms, in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-12-05 Anusha Nagabandi , Gregory Kahn , Ronald S. Fearing , Sergey Levine

Representation learning is a widely adopted framework for learning in data-scarce environments to obtain a feature extractor or representation from various different yet related tasks. Despite extensive research on representation learning,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-30 Donghwa Kang , Shana Moothedath

Modern tasks in reinforcement learning have large state and action spaces. To deal with them efficiently, one often uses predefined feature mapping to represent states and actions in a low-dimensional space. In this paper, we study…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-24 Dongruo Zhou , Jiafan He , Quanquan Gu

Creating reinforcement learning (RL) agents that are capable of accepting and leveraging task-specific knowledge from humans has been long identified as a possible strategy for developing scalable approaches for solving long-horizon…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-06-22 Lin Guan , Sarath Sreedharan , Subbarao Kambhampati

Most model-free reinforcement learning methods leverage state representations (embeddings) for generalization, but either ignore structure in the space of actions or assume the structure is provided a priori. We show how a policy can be…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-16 Yash Chandak , Georgios Theocharous , James Kostas , Scott Jordan , Philip S. Thomas