English
Related papers

Related papers: Block Contextual MDPs for Continual Learning

200 papers

Fueled by advances in both robust optimization theory and reinforcement learning (RL), robust Markov Decision Processes (RMDPs) have garnered increasing attention due to their powerful capability for sequential decision-making under…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-07-08 Wenfan Ou , Sheng Bi

In typical reinforcement learning (RL), the environment is assumed given and the goal of the learning is to identify an optimal policy for the agent taking actions through its interactions with the environment. In this paper, we extend this…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2019-10-25 Haifeng Zhang , Jun Wang , Zhiming Zhou , Weinan Zhang , Ying Wen , Yong Yu , Wenxin Li

In practical applications, we can rarely assume full observability of a system's environment, despite such knowledge being important for determining a reactive control system's precise interaction with its environment. Therefore, we propose…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-24 Edi Muskardin , Martin Tappler , Bernhard K. Aichernig , Ingo Pill

Constrained reinforcement learning is to maximize the expected reward subject to constraints on utilities/costs. However, the training environment may not be the same as the test one, due to, e.g., modeling error, adversarial attack,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-16 Yue Wang , Fei Miao , Shaofeng Zou

Policy-based algorithms are among the most widely adopted techniques in model-free RL, thanks to their strong theoretical groundings and good properties in continuous action spaces. Unfortunately, these methods require precise and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-14 Luca Sabbioni , Francesco Corda , Marcello Restelli

We present a model-free reinforcement learning algorithm to find an optimal policy for a finite-horizon Markov decision process while guaranteeing a desired lower bound on the probability of satisfying a signal temporal logic (STL)…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2021-09-29 Krishna C. Kalagarla , Rahul Jain , Pierluigi Nuzzo

Deploying reinforcement learning policies in the real world requires adapting to time-varying environments. We study this problem in the contextual Markov Decision Process (cMDP) framework, where a family of environments is indexed by a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-04 Param Budhraja , Aditya Gangrade , Alex Olshevsky , Venkatesh Saligrama

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

Reinforcement learning usually assumes a given or sometimes even fixed environment in which an agent seeks an optimal policy to maximize its long-term discounted reward. In contrast, we consider agents that are not limited to passive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-20 Ziqing Lu , Babak Hassibi , Lifeng Lai , Weiyu Xu

A novel reinforcement learning scheme to synthesize policies for continuous-space Markov decision processes (MDPs) is proposed. This scheme enables one to apply model-free, off-the-shelf reinforcement learning algorithms for finite MDPs to…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2020-03-03 Abolfazl Lavaei , Fabio Somenzi , Sadegh Soudjani , Ashutosh Trivedi , Majid Zamani

Reinforcement learning (RL) approaches based on Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) are predominantly applied in the robot joint space, often relying on limited task-specific information and partial awareness of the 3D environment. In…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-03-09 Bingkun Huang , Yuhe Gong , Zewen Yang , Tianyu Ren , Luis Figueredo

We consider reinforcement learning (RL) for a class of problems with bagged decision times. A bag contains a finite sequence of consecutive decision times. The transition dynamics are non-Markovian and non-stationary within a bag. All…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-08 Daiqi Gao , Hsin-Yu Lai , Predrag Klasnja , Susan A. Murphy

This paper presents a framework to tackle constrained combinatorial optimization problems using deep Reinforcement Learning (RL). To this end, we extend the Neural Combinatorial Optimization (NCO) theory in order to deal with constraints in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-23 Ruben Solozabal , Josu Ceberio , Martin Takáč

The Markov decision process (MDP) formulation used to model many real-world sequential decision making problems does not efficiently capture the setting where the set of available decisions (actions) at each time step is stochastic.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-22 Yash Chandak , Georgios Theocharous , Blossom Metevier , Philip S. Thomas

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has achieved remarkable success across multiple domains, including competitive games, natural language processing, and robotics. Despite these advancements, policies trained via DRL often struggle to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-30 James Chapman , Kedar Karhadkar , Guido Montufar

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

We consider large-scale Markov decision processes (MDPs) with parameter uncertainty, under the robust MDP paradigm. Previous studies showed that robust MDPs, based on a minimax approach to handle uncertainty, can be solved using dynamic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2013-06-27 Aviv Tamar , Huan Xu , Shie Mannor

Most reinforcement learning methods are based upon the key assumption that the transition dynamics and reward functions are fixed, that is, the underlying Markov decision process is stationary. However, in many real-world applications, this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-09-23 Yash Chandak , Georgios Theocharous , Shiv Shankar , Martha White , Sridhar Mahadevan , Philip S. Thomas

Recursion is the fundamental paradigm to finitely describe potentially infinite objects. As state-of-the-art reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms cannot directly reason about recursion, they must rely on the practitioner's ingenuity in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-24 Ernst Moritz Hahn , Mateo Perez , Sven Schewe , Fabio Somenzi , Ashutosh Trivedi , Dominik Wojtczak

Designing sample-efficient and computationally feasible reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms is particularly challenging in environments with large or infinite state and action spaces. In this paper, we advance this effort by presenting…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-04 Zakaria Mhammedi