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Generalization in partially observed markov decision processes (POMDPs) is critical for successful applications of visual reinforcement learning (VRL) in real scenarios. A widely used idea is to learn task-relevant representations that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-21 Jie Wang , Rui Yang , Zijie Geng , Zhihao Shi , Mingxuan Ye , Qi Zhou , Shuiwang Ji , Bin Li , Yongdong Zhang , Feng Wu

We study the problem of inverse reinforcement learning (IRL), where the learning agent recovers a reward function using expert demonstrations. Most of the existing IRL techniques make the often unrealistic assumption that the agent has…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-20 Franck Djeumou , Murat Cubuktepe , Craig Lennon , Ufuk Topcu

In order for autonomous mobile robots to navigate in human spaces, they must abide by our social norms. Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as an effective method to train sequential decision-making policies that are able to respect…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-03-01 Adam Sigal , Hsiu-Chin Lin , AJung Moon

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

Penetration testing, the simulation of cyberattacks to identify security vulnerabilities, presents a sequential decision-making problem well-suited for reinforcement learning (RL) automation. Like many applications of RL to real-world…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-25 Raphael Simon , Pieter Libin , Wim Mees

Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs) model decision making under uncertainty. While there are many approaches to approximately solving POMDPs, we aim to address the problem of learning such models. In particular, we are…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-05-13 Aidan Curtis , Hao Tang , Thiago Veloso , Kevin Ellis , Joshua Tenenbaum , Tomás Lozano-Pérez , Leslie Pack Kaelbling

In reinforcement learning (RL), an agent learns to perform a task by interacting with an environment and receiving feedback (a numerical reward) for its actions. However, the assumption that rewards are always observable is often not…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-15 Simone Parisi , Montaser Mohammedalamen , Alireza Kazemipour , Matthew E. Taylor , Michael Bowling

Motivated by the prevailing paradigm of using unsupervised learning for efficient exploration in reinforcement learning (RL) problems [tang2017exploration,bellemare2016unifying], we investigate when this paradigm is provably efficient. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-02 Fei Feng , Ruosong Wang , Wotao Yin , Simon S. Du , Lin F. Yang

Partial observability of the underlying states generally presents significant challenges for reinforcement learning (RL). In practice, certain \emph{privileged information}, e.g., the access to states from simulators, has been exploited in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-24 Yang Cai , Xiangyu Liu , Argyris Oikonomou , Kaiqing Zhang

In the Bayesian reinforcement learning (RL) setting, a prior distribution over the unknown problem parameters -- the rewards and transitions -- is assumed, and a policy that optimizes the (posterior) expected return is sought. A common…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-27 Aviv Tamar , Daniel Soudry , Ev Zisselman

Many interesting real world domains involve reinforcement learning (RL) in partially observable environments. Efficient learning in such domains is important, but existing sample complexity bounds for partially observable RL are at least…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-06-02 Zhaohan Daniel Guo , Shayan Doroudi , Emma Brunskill

Humans achieve efficient learning by relying on prior knowledge about the structure of naturally occurring tasks. There is considerable interest in designing reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms with similar properties. This includes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-23 Jan Humplik , Alexandre Galashov , Leonard Hasenclever , Pedro A. Ortega , Yee Whye Teh , Nicolas Heess

This paper proposes an observer-based framework for solving Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs) when an accurate model is not available. We first propose to use a Moving Horizon Estimation-Model Predictive Control…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2021-03-23 Hossein Nejatbakhsh Esfahani , Arash Bahari Kordabad , Sebastien Gros

A major component of overfitting in model-free reinforcement learning (RL) involves the case where the agent may mistakenly correlate reward with certain spurious features from the observations generated by the Markov Decision Process…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-01 Xingyou Song , Yiding Jiang , Stephen Tu , Yilun Du , Behnam Neyshabur

We consider the problem of imitation learning from expert demonstrations in partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs). Belief representations, which characterize the distribution over the latent states in a POMDP, have been…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-25 Tanmay Gangwani , Joel Lehman , Qiang Liu , Jian Peng

Rote learning is a memorization technique based on repetition. Many researchers argue that rote learning hinders generalization because it encourages verbatim memorization rather than deeper understanding. This concern extends even to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Qinyuan Wu , Soumi Das , Mahsa Amani , Bishwamittra Ghosh , Mohammad Aflah Khan , Krishna P. Gummadi , Muhammad Bilal Zafar

Delays frequently occur in real-world environments, yet standard reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms often assume instantaneous perception of the environment. We study random sensor delays in POMDPs, where observations may arrive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-17 Armin Karamzade , Kyungmin Kim , JB Lanier , Davide Corsi , Roy Fox

Unlike traditional reinforcement learning (RL), market-based RL is in principle applicable to worlds described by partially observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs), where an agent needs to learn short-term memories of relevant…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2007-05-23 Ivo Kwee , Marcus Hutter , Juergen Schmidhuber

Partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) are a principled planning model for sequential decision-making under uncertainty. Yet, real-world problems with high-dimensional observations, such as camera images, remain intractable…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-06 Miriam Schäfers , Merlijn Krale , Thiago D. Simão , Nils Jansen , Maximilian Weininger

This paper studies the sample-efficiency of learning in Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs), a challenging problem in reinforcement learning that is known to be exponentially hard in the worst-case. Motivated by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-07 Jiacheng Guo , Minshuo Chen , Huan Wang , Caiming Xiong , Mengdi Wang , Yu Bai