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The continuous nature of belief states in POMDPs presents significant computational challenges in learning the optimal policy. In this paper, we consider an approach that solves a Partially Observable Reinforcement Learning (PORL) problem…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-15 Ameya Anjarlekar , Rasoul Etesami , R Srikant

Inference-time alignment methods have gained significant attention for their efficiency and effectiveness in aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences. However, existing dominant approaches using reward-guided search…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-01 Bin Xie , Bingbing Xu , Yige Yuan , Shengmao Zhu , Huawei Shen

Large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in performing complex multi-step reasoning, yet they continue to struggle with mathematical reasoning, often making systematic errors. A promising solution is reinforcement learning (RL)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-22 Hanning Zhang , Pengcheng Wang , Shizhe Diao , Yong Lin , Rui Pan , Hanze Dong , Dylan Zhang , Pavlo Molchanov , Tong Zhang

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

One of the fundamental challenges in reinforcement learning (RL) is the one of data efficiency: modern algorithms require a very large number of training samples, especially compared to humans, for solving environments with high-dimensional…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-10 Hlynur Davíð Hlynsson , Laurenz Wiskott

This paper presents a novel state representation for reward-free Markov decision processes. The idea is to learn, in a self-supervised manner, an embedding space where distances between pairs of embedded states correspond to the minimum…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-05 Lorenzo Steccanella , Anders Jonsson

Models of dynamical systems based on predictive state representations (PSRs) are defined strictly in terms of observable quantities, in contrast with traditional models (such as Hidden Markov Models) that use latent variables or statespace…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2012-07-09 Matthew Rudary , Satinder Singh , David Wingate

In the theory of Partially Observed Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs), existence of optimal policies have in general been established via converting the original partially observed stochastic control problem to a fully observed one on the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-01-11 Ali Devran Kara , Serdar Yuksel

Process supervision enhances the performance of large language models in reasoning tasks by providing feedback at each step of chain-of-thought reasoning. However, due to the lack of effective process supervision methods, even advanced…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-05-15 Jiawei Li , Xinyue Liang , Junlong Zhang , Yizhe Yang , Chong Feng , Yang Gao

The standard RL world model is that of a Markov Decision Process (MDP). A basic premise of MDPs is that the rewards depend on the last state and action only. Yet, many real-world rewards are non-Markovian. For example, a reward for bringing…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2019-12-06 Maor Gaon , Ronen I. Brafman

A tenet of reinforcement learning is that the agent always observes rewards. However, this is not true in many realistic settings, e.g., a human observer may not always be available to provide rewards, sensors may be limited or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Alireza Kazemipour , Simone Parisi , Matthew E. Taylor , Michael Bowling

In many practical settings control decisions must be made under partial/imperfect information about the evolution of a relevant state variable. Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs) is a relatively well-developed framework…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-30 Yanling Chang , Alfredo Garcia , Zhide Wang , Lu Sun

We consider the problem belief-state monitoring for the purposes of implementing a policy for a partially-observable Markov decision process (POMDP), specifically how one might approximate the belief state. Other schemes for belief-state…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2013-01-18 Pascal Poupart , Craig Boutilier

Over the past decade there has been considerable interest in spectral algorithms for learning Predictive State Representations (PSRs). Spectral algorithms have appealing theoretical guarantees; however, the resulting models do not always…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-02-15 Carlton Downey , Ahmed Hefny , Geoffrey Gordon

POMDPs are useful models for systems where the true underlying state is not known completely to an outside observer; the outside observer incompletely knows the true state of the system, and observes a noisy version of the true system…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-01 Caleb M. Bowyer

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).…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-01 Jeongyeol Kwon , Yonathan Efroni , Constantine Caramanis , Shie Mannor

Partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) are a general framework for sequential decision-making under latent state uncertainty, yet learning in POMDPs is intractable in the worst case. Motivated by sensing and probing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-27 Ming Shi , Yingbin Liang , Ness B. Shroff

In applications of offline reinforcement learning to observational data, such as in healthcare or education, a general concern is that observed actions might be affected by unobserved factors, inducing confounding and biasing estimates…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-24 Andrew Bennett , Nathan Kallus

In this review/tutorial article, we present recent progress on optimal control of partially observed Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs). We first present regularity and continuity conditions for POMDPs and their belief-MDP reductions, where…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-01-03 Ali Devran Kara , Serdar Yuksel

Reinforcement learning methods trained on few environments rarely learn policies that generalize to unseen environments. To improve generalization, we incorporate the inherent sequential structure in reinforcement learning into the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-19 Rishabh Agarwal , Marlos C. Machado , Pablo Samuel Castro , Marc G. Bellemare