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Related papers: Reinforcement Learning in Reward-Mixing MDPs

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Safe reinforcement learning has been a promising approach for optimizing the policy of an agent that operates in safety-critical applications. In this paper, we propose an algorithm, SNO-MDP, that explores and optimizes Markov decision…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-18 Akifumi Wachi , Yanan Sui

Although in recent years reinforcement learning has become very popular the number of successful applications to different kinds of operations research problems is rather scarce. Reinforcement learning is based on the well-studied dynamic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-04-03 Manuel Schneckenreither

Markov decision processes (MDPs) are used to model a wide variety of applications ranging from game playing over robotics to finance. Their optimal policy typically maximizes the expected sum of rewards given at each step of the decision…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-26 Maximilian Nägele , Jan Olle , Thomas Fösel , Remmy Zen , Florian Marquardt

We investigate model-based reinforcement learning in contextual Markov decision processes (C-MDPs) in which the context is unobserved and induces confounding in the offline dataset. In such settings, conventional model-learning methods are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-09 Nishanth Venkatesh , Andreas A. Malikopoulos

We revisit offline reinforcement learning on episodic time-homogeneous Markov Decision Processes (MDP). For tabular MDP with $S$ states and $A$ actions, or linear MDP with anchor points and feature dimension $d$, given the collected $K$…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-02-11 Tongzheng Ren , Jialian Li , Bo Dai , Simon S. Du , Sujay Sanghavi

A Markov Decision Process (MDP) is a popular model for reinforcement learning. However, its commonly used assumption of stationary dynamics and rewards is too stringent and fails to hold in adversarial, nonstationary, or multi-agent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-08-22 Tiancheng Yu , Suvrit Sra

Training reinforcement learning (RL) agents using scalar reward signals is often infeasible when an environment has sparse and non-Markovian rewards. Moreover, handcrafting these reward functions before training is prone to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-04 Alessandro Abate , Yousif Almulla , James Fox , David Hyland , Michael Wooldridge

Markov Decision Process (MDP) presents a mathematical framework to formulate the learning processes of agents in reinforcement learning. MDP is limited by the Markovian assumption that a reward only depends on the immediate state and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-04 Bohao Qu , Xiaofeng Cao , Jielong Yang , Hechang Chen , Chang Yi , Ivor W. Tsang , Yew-Soon Ong

Reinforcement learning algorithms typically rely on the assumption that the environment dynamics and value function can be expressed in terms of a Markovian state representation. However, when state information is only partially observable,…

In probably approximately correct (PAC) reinforcement learning (RL), an agent is required to identify an $\epsilon$-optimal policy with probability $1-\delta$. While minimax optimal algorithms exist for this problem, its instance-dependent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-25 Andrea Tirinzoni , Aymen Al-Marjani , Emilie Kaufmann

The problem of selecting the right state-representation in a reinforcement learning problem is considered. Several models (functions mapping past observations to a finite set) of the observations are given, and it is known that for at least…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2013-02-12 Odalric-Ambrym Maillard , Rémi Munos , Daniil Ryabko

An in-depth understanding of the particular environment is crucial in reinforcement learning (RL). To address this challenge, the decision-making process of a mobile collaborative robotic assistant modeled by the Markov decision process…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-29 Mónika Farsang , Luca Szegletes

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

We address the problem of reinforcement learning in which observations may exhibit an arbitrary form of stochastic dependence on past observations and actions, i.e. environments more general than (PO)MDPs. The task for an agent is to attain…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2009-12-30 Daniil Ryabko , Marcus Hutter

We consider the problem of learning by demonstration from agents acting in unknown stochastic Markov environments or games. Our aim is to estimate agent preferences in order to construct improved policies for the same task that the agents…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2014-08-12 Aristide Tossou , Christos Dimitrakakis

We consider the problem of learning by demonstration from agents acting in unknown stochastic Markov environments or games. Our aim is to estimate agent preferences in order to construct improved policies for the same task that the agents…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2013-07-16 Aristide C. Y. Tossou , Christos Dimitrakakis

Many applications -- including power systems, robotics, and economics -- involve a dynamical system interacting with a stochastic and hard-to-model environment. We adopt a reinforcement learning approach to control such systems.…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-08-26 Abed AlRahman Al Makdah , Oliver Kosut , Lalitha Sankar , Shaofeng Zou

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

We propose a new reinforcement learning algorithm for partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDP) based on spectral decomposition methods. While spectral methods have been previously employed for consistent learning of (passive)…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-06-20 Kamyar Azizzadenesheli , Alessandro Lazaric , Animashree Anandkumar

Most reinforcement learning algorithms are based on a key assumption that Markov decision processes (MDPs) are stationary. However, non-stationary MDPs with dynamic action space are omnipresent in real-world scenarios. Yet problems of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-04 Jiaqi Ye , Xiaodong Li , Pangjing Wu , Feng Wang