English
Related papers

Related papers: Learning Good State and Action Representations via…

200 papers

We study model-based learning of finite-window policies in tabular partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs). A common approach to learning under partial observability is to approximate unbounded history dependencies using…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-02 Philip Jordan , Maryam Kamgarpour

Value decomposition has long been a fundamental technique in multi-agent dynamic programming and reinforcement learning (RL). Specifically, the value function of a global state $(s_1,s_2,\ldots,s_N)$ is often approximated as the sum of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-14 Shuze Chen , Tianyi Peng

We propose a new, nonparametric approach to learning and representing transition dynamics in Markov decision processes (MDPs), which can be combined easily with dynamic programming methods for policy optimisation and value estimation. This…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-06-22 Steffen Grunewalder , Guy Lever , Luca Baldassarre , Massi Pontil , Arthur Gretton

Active inference provides a general framework for behavior and learning in autonomous agents. It states that an agent will attempt to minimize its variational free energy, defined in terms of beliefs over observations, internal states and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-12 Samuel T. Wauthier , Bram Vanhecke , Tim Verbelen , Bart Dhoedt

We present a long-term intrinsically motivated structure learning method for modeling transition dynamics during controlled interactions between a robot and semi-permanent structures in the world. In particular, we discuss how…

Robotics · Computer Science 2016-07-18 Jay Ming Wong , Roderic A. Grupen

We consider online learning for minimizing regret in unknown, episodic Markov decision processes (MDPs) with continuous states and actions. We develop variants of the UCRL and posterior sampling algorithms that employ nonparametric Gaussian…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-01-04 Sayak Ray Chowdhury , Aditya Gopalan

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-07 Roberto Cipollone , Giuseppe De Giacomo , Marco Favorito , Luca Iocchi , Fabio Patrizi

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…

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

We consider the problem of learning low-dimensional representations for large-scale Markov chains. We formulate the task of representation learning as that of mapping the state space of the model to a low-dimensional state space, called the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-04-09 Mahsa Ghasemi , Abolfazl Hashemi , Haris Vikalo , Ufuk Topcu

Continual learning (CL) has spurred the development of several methods aimed at consolidating previous knowledge across sequential learning. Yet, the evaluations of these methods have primarily focused on the final output, such as changes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-20 Nishant Suresh Aswani , Amira Guesmi , Muhammad Abdullah Hanif , Muhammad Shafique

We investigate the problem of best-policy identification in discounted Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) when the learner has access to a generative model. The objective is to devise a learning algorithm returning the best policy as early as…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-05-11 Aymen Al Marjani , Alexandre Proutiere

We study reinforcement learning with function approximation for large-scale Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs) where the state space and observation space are large or even continuous. Particularly, we consider Hilbert…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-27 Masatoshi Uehara , Ayush Sekhari , Jason D. Lee , Nathan Kallus , Wen Sun

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-08 Kaige Yang

In this paper, we use concepts from supervisory control theory of discrete event systems to propose a method to learn optimal control policies for a finite-state Markov Decision Process (MDP) in which (only) certain sequences of actions are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-04 Arun Raman , Keerthan Shagrithaya , Shalabh Bhatnagar

We introduce a framework for approximate analysis of Markov decision processes (MDP) with bounded-, unbounded-, and infinite-horizon properties. The main idea is to identify a "core" of an MDP, i.e., a subsystem where we provably remain…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-06-22 Jan Křetínský , Tobias Meggendorfer

We consider a reinforcement learning setting introduced in (Maillard et al., NIPS 2011) where the learner does not have explicit access to the states of the underlying Markov decision process (MDP). Instead, she has access to several models…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2014-09-16 Ronald Ortner , Odalric-Ambrym Maillard , Daniil Ryabko

In this paper, we study discrete-time absorbing Markov Decision Processes (MDP) with measurable state space and Borel action space with a given initial distribution. For such models, solutions to the characteristic equation that are not…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-10-10 François Dufour , Tomás Prieto-Rumeau

Tensor decomposition of high-dimensional data often struggles to capture semantically or physically meaningful structures, particularly when relying on reconstruction objectives and fixed-rank constraints. We introduce a no-rank tensor…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Maryam Bagherian

Many problems in sequential decision making and stochastic control often have natural multiscale structure: sub-tasks are assembled together to accomplish complex goals. Systematically inferring and leveraging hierarchical structure,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2012-12-06 Jake Bouvrie , Mauro Maggioni