Related papers: Iterative Bounding MDPs: Learning Interpretable Po…
Planning under uncertainty is critical to robotics. The Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP) is a mathematical framework for such planning problems. It is powerful due to its careful quantification of the non-deterministic…
We introduce Multi-Environment Markov Decision Processes (MEMDPs) which are MDPs with a set of probabilistic transition functions. The goal in a MEMDP is to synthesize a single controller with guaranteed performances against all…
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…
Modern large-scale computing deployments consist of complex applications running over machine clusters. An important issue in these is the offering of elasticity, i.e., the dynamic allocation of resources to applications to meet fluctuating…
We consider the Markov Decision Process (MDP) of selecting a subset of items at each step, termed the Select-MDP (S-MDP). The large state and action spaces of S-MDPs make them intractable to solve with typical reinforcement learning (RL)…
Hierarchical reinforcement learning methods offer a powerful means of planning flexible behavior in complicated domains. However, learning an appropriate hierarchical decomposition of a domain into subtasks remains a substantial challenge.…
We present a data-driven approach for producing policies that are provably robust across unknown stochastic environments. Existing approaches can learn models of a single environment as an interval Markov decision processes (IMDP) and…
Markov decisions processes (MDPs) are becoming increasing popular as models of decision theoretic planning. While traditional dynamic programming methods perform well for problems with small state spaces, structured methods are needed for…
Reinforcement learning usually assumes a given or sometimes even fixed environment in which an agent seeks an optimal policy to maximize its long-term discounted reward. In contrast, we consider agents that are not limited to passive…
We study policy gradient methods for reinforcement learning in non-Markovian decision processes (NMDPs), where observations and rewards depend on the entire interaction history. To handle this dependence, the agent maintains an internal…
We introduce Dynamic Contextual Markov Decision Processes (DCMDPs), a novel reinforcement learning framework for history-dependent environments that generalizes the contextual MDP framework to handle non-Markov environments, where contexts…
We present an optimization-based framework for robust permissive synthesis for Interval Markov Decision Processes (IMDPs), motivated by robotic decision-making under transition uncertainty. In many robotic systems, model inaccuracies and…
We propose an active learning architecture for robots, capable of organizing its learning process to achieve a field of complex tasks by learning sequences of motor policies, called Intrinsically Motivated Procedure Babbling (IM-PB). The…
In this paper, we consider solving discounted Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) under the constraint that the resulting policy is stabilizing. In practice MDPs are solved based on some form of policy approximation. We will leverage recent…
A basic model in sequential decision making is the Markov decision process (MDP), which is extended to Robust MDPs (RMDPs) by allowing uncertainty in transition probabilities and optimizing against the worst-case transition probabilities…
Motivated from Bertsekas' recent study on policy iteration (PI) for solving the problems of infinite-horizon discounted Markov decision processes (MDPs) in an on-line setting, we develop an off-line PI integrated with a multi-policy…
Transfer reinforcement learning aims to improve the sample efficiency of solving unseen new tasks by leveraging experiences obtained from previous tasks. We consider the setting where all tasks (MDPs) share the same environment dynamic…
Decision trees are ubiquitous in machine learning for their ease of use and interpretability. Yet, these models are not typically employed in reinforcement learning as they cannot be updated online via stochastic gradient descent. We…
We present a technique for speeding up the convergence of value iteration for partially observable Markov decisions processes (POMDPs). The underlying idea is similar to that behind modified policy iteration for fully observable Markov…
Robust Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) are receiving much attention in learning a robust policy which is less sensitive to environment changes. There are an increasing number of works analyzing sample-efficiency of robust MDPs. However,…