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We are interested in enabling autonomous agents to learn and reason about systems with hidden states, such as locking mechanisms. We cast this problem as learning the parameters of a discrete Partially Observable Markov Decision Process…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Seiji Shaw , Travis Manderson , Chad Kessens , Nicholas Roy

We study the setting of \emph{performative reinforcement learning} where the deployed policy affects both the reward, and the transition of the underlying Markov decision process. Prior work~\parencite{MTR23} has addressed this problem…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-18 Debmalya Mandal , Goran Radanovic

Two main challenges in Reinforcement Learning (RL) are designing appropriate reward functions and ensuring the safety of the learned policy. To address these challenges, we present a theoretical framework for Inverse Reinforcement Learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-02 Andreas Schlaginhaufen , Maryam Kamgarpour

The partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP) provides a principled general model for planning under uncertainty. However, solving a general POMDP is computationally intractable in the worst case. This paper introduces…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2016-02-24 Min Chen , Emilio Frazzoli , David Hsu , Wee Sun Lee

Episodic training, where an agent's environment is reset after every success or failure, is the de facto standard when training embodied reinforcement learning (RL) agents. The underlying assumption that the environment can be easily reset…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-03-31 Zichen Zhang , Luca Weihs

We consider online reinforcement learning (RL) in episodic Markov decision processes (MDPs) under the linear $q^\pi$-realizability assumption, where it is assumed that the action-values of all policies can be expressed as linear functions…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-21 Gellért Weisz , András György , Csaba Szepesvári

This paper addresses the problem of training a reinforcement learning (RL) policy under partial observability by exploiting a privileged, anytime-feasible planner agent available exclusively during training. We formalize this as a Partially…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-10 Mohsen Amiri , Mohsen Amiri , Ali Beikmohammadi , Sindri Magnuśson , Mehdi Hosseinzadeh

Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs) remain a core challenge in reinforcement learning due to incomplete state information. We address this by reformulating POMDPs as fully observable processes with fixed-length…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-16 Wuhao Wang , Zhiyong Chen

The integration of physiological computing into mixed-initiative human-robot interaction systems offers valuable advantages in autonomous task allocation by incorporating real-time features as human state observations into the…

Reinforcement learning (RL) in Markov decision processes (MDPs) with large state spaces is a challenging problem. The performance of standard RL algorithms degrades drastically with the dimensionality of state space. However, in practice,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-06-21 Kamyar Azizzadenesheli , Alessandro Lazaric , Animashree Anandkumar

Real-world decision-making tasks are usually partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs), where the state is not fully observable. Recent progress has demonstrated that recurrent reinforcement learning (RL), which consists of a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-27 Fan-Ming Luo , Zuolin Tu , Zefang Huang , Yang Yu

Experimental studies are a cornerstone of Machine Learning (ML) research. A common and often implicit assumption is that the study's results will generalize beyond the study itself, e.g., to new data. That is, repeating the same study under…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-05 Federico Matteucci , Vadim Arzamasov , Jose Cribeiro-Ramallo , Marco Heyden , Konstantin Ntounas , Klemens Böhm

Multi-modal learning has achieved remarkable success by integrating information from various modalities, achieving superior performance in tasks like recognition and retrieval compared to uni-modal approaches. However, real-world scenarios…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-08-05 Xiaohao Liu , Xiaobo Xia , Zhuo Huang , See-Kiong Ng , Tat-Seng Chua

The linear Markov Decision Process (MDP) framework offers a principled foundation for reinforcement learning (RL) with strong theoretical guarantees and sample efficiency. However, its restrictive assumption-that both transition dynamics…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-06-03 Sinian Zhang , Kaicheng Zhang , Ziping Xu , Tianxi Cai , Doudou Zhou

Transformer-based methods have exhibited significant generalization ability when prompted with target-domain demonstrations or example solutions during inference. Although demonstrations, as a way of task specification, can capture rich…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-13 Meng Song , Xuezhi Wang , Tanay Biradar , Yao Qin , Manmohan Chandraker

Many medical decision-making tasks can be framed as partially observed Markov decision processes (POMDPs). However, prevailing two-stage approaches that first learn a POMDP and then solve it often fail because the model that best fits the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-04-01 Joseph Futoma , Michael C. Hughes , Finale Doshi-Velez

In real-world reinforcement learning (RL) scenarios, agents often encounter partial observability, where incomplete or noisy information obscures the true state of the environment. Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs) are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-19 Ashok Arora , Neetesh Kumar

Many physical systems have underlying safety considerations that require that the policy employed ensures the satisfaction of a set of constraints. The analytical formulation usually takes the form of a Constrained Markov Decision Process…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-03 Aria HasanzadeZonuzy , Archana Bura , Dileep Kalathil , Srinivas Shakkottai

As a paradigm for sequential decision making in unknown environments, reinforcement learning (RL) has received a flurry of attention in recent years. However, the explosion of model complexity in emerging applications and the presence of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-07-22 Yuejie Chi , Yuxin Chen , Yuting Wei

Reinforcement learning (RL) combines a control problem with statistical estimation: The system dynamics are not known to the agent, but can be learned through experience. A recent line of research casts `RL as inference' and suggests a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-05 Brendan O'Donoghue , Ian Osband , Catalin Ionescu