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Related papers: Block Contextual MDPs for Continual Learning

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This paper investigates model robustness in reinforcement learning (RL) to reduce the sim-to-real gap in practice. We adopt the framework of distributionally robust Markov decision processes (RMDPs), aimed at learning a policy that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-09 Laixi Shi , Gen Li , Yuting Wei , Yuxin Chen , Matthieu Geist , Yuejie Chi

Real-world reinforcement learning demands adaptation to unseen environmental conditions without costly retraining. Contextual Markov Decision Processes (cMDP) model this challenge, but existing methods often require explicit context…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-19 Frank Röder , Jan Benad , Manfred Eppe , Pradeep Kr. Banerjee

Robust reinforcement learning (RL) is to find a policy that optimizes the worst-case performance over an uncertainty set of MDPs. In this paper, we focus on model-free robust RL, where the uncertainty set is defined to be centering at a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-29 Yue Wang , Shaofeng Zou

Recent advances in reinforcement learning (RL) enable its use on increasingly complex tasks, but the lack of formal safety guarantees still limits its application in safety-critical settings. A common practical approach is to augment the RL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-12 Donggeon David Oh , Duy P. Nguyen , Haimin Hu , Jaime F. Fisac

Many practical decision-making problems involve tasks whose success depends on the entire system history, rather than on achieving a state with desired properties. Markovian Reinforcement Learning (RL) approaches are not suitable for such…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-17 Alessandro Trapasso , Luca Iocchi , Fabio Patrizi

Generalization across environments is critical to the successful application of reinforcement learning algorithms to real-world challenges. In this paper, we consider the problem of learning abstractions that generalize in block MDPs,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-15 Amy Zhang , Clare Lyle , Shagun Sodhani , Angelos Filos , Marta Kwiatkowska , Joelle Pineau , Yarin Gal , Doina Precup

This work studies offline Reinforcement Learning (RL) in a class of non-Markovian environments called Regular Decision Processes (RDPs). In RDPs, the unknown dependency of future observations and rewards from the past interactions can be…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-05 Ahana Deb , Roberto Cipollone , Anders Jonsson , Alessandro Ronca , Mohammad Sadegh Talebi

Deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) is successful in solving many complex Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) problems. However, agents often face unanticipated environmental changes after deployment in the real world. These changes are often…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-29 Beining Han , Chongyi Zheng , Harris Chan , Keiran Paster , Michael R. Zhang , Jimmy Ba

Motivated by the need for a robust policy in the face of environment shifts between training and deployment, we contribute to the theoretical foundation of distributionally robust reinforcement learning (DRRL). This is accomplished through…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-26 Shengbo Wang , Nian Si , Jose Blanchet , Zhengyuan Zhou

We study a class of sequential decision-making problems with augmented predictions, potentially provided by a machine learning algorithm. In this setting, the decision-maker receives prediction intervals for unknown parameters that become…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-05 Xin Chen , Yuze Chen , Yuan Zhou

Dialogue assistants are rapidly becoming an indispensable daily aid. To avoid the significant effort needed to hand-craft the required dialogue flow, the Dialogue Management (DM) module can be cast as a continuous Markov Decision Process…

We study learning contextual MDPs using a function approximation for both the rewards and the dynamics. We consider both the case that the dynamics dependent or independent of the context. For both models we derive polynomial sample and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-01 Orin Levy , Yishay Mansour

Reinforcement learning is an emerging approaches to facilitate multi-stage sequential decision-making problems. This paper studies a real-time multi-stage stochastic power dispatch considering multivariate uncertainties. Current researches…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-24 Bairong Deng , Tao Yu , Zhenning Pan , Xuehan Zhang , Yufeng Wu , Qiaoyi Ding

Initial DR studies mainly adopt model predictive control and thus require accurate models of the control problem (e.g., a customer behavior model), which are to a large extent uncertain for the EV scenario. Hence, model-free approaches,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-11-30 Nasrin Sadeghianpourhamami , Johannes Deleu , Chris Develder

We study learning in periodic Markov Decision Process(MDP), a special type of non-stationary MDP where both the state transition probabilities and reward functions vary periodically, under the average reward maximization setting. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-26 Ayush Aniket , Arpan Chattopadhyay

In dynamic programming (DP) and reinforcement learning (RL), an agent learns to act optimally in terms of expected long-term return by sequentially interacting with its environment modeled by a Markov decision process (MDP). More generally…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-03 Mastane Achab , Gergely Neu

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

Robust Markov Decision Processes (RMDPs) have received significant research interest, offering an alternative to standard Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) that often assume fixed transition probabilities. RMDPs address this by optimizing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-06 Xinyi Ni , Lifeng Lai

The commonly used Reinforcement Learning (RL) model, MDPs (Markov Decision Processes), has a basic premise that rewards depend on the current state and action only. However, many real-world tasks are non-Markovian, which has long-term…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-18 Ruixuan Miao , Xu Lu , Cong Tian , Bin Yu , Zhenhua Duan

This paper studies the control synthesis of motion planning subject to uncertainties. The uncertainties are considered in robot motions and environment properties, giving rise to the probabilistic labeled Markov decision process (PL-MDP). A…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-01-31 Mingyu Cai , Shaoping Xiao , Zhijun Li , Zhen Kan