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In reinforcement learning (RL), when defining a Markov Decision Process (MDP), the environment dynamics is implicitly assumed to be stationary. This assumption of stationarity, while simplifying, can be unrealistic in many scenarios. In the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-15 Shagun Sodhani , Franziska Meier , Joelle Pineau , Amy Zhang

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

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 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

While sequential decision-making environments often involve high-dimensional observations, not all features of these observations are relevant for control. In particular, the observation space may capture factors of the environment which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-28 Alexander Levine , Peter Stone , Amy Zhang

Exogenous state variables and rewards can slow reinforcement learning by injecting uncontrolled variation into the reward signal. This paper formalizes exogenous state variables and rewards and shows that if the reward function decomposes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-15 George Trimponias , Thomas G. Dietterich

We study the exploration problem in episodic MDPs with rich observations generated from a small number of latent states. Under certain identifiability assumptions, we demonstrate how to estimate a mapping from the observations to latent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-10 Simon S. Du , Akshay Krishnamurthy , Nan Jiang , Alekh Agarwal , Miroslav Dudík , John Langford

In this paper we study online Reinforcement Learning (RL) in partially observable dynamical systems. We focus on the Predictive State Representations (PSRs) model, which is an expressive model that captures other well-known models such as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-16 Wenhao Zhan , Masatoshi Uehara , Wen Sun , Jason D. Lee

Online reinforcement learning (RL) has been widely applied in information processing scenarios, which usually exhibit much uncertainty due to the intrinsic randomness of channels and service demands. In this paper, we consider an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-17 Rongpeng Li

We study Exo-MDPs, a structured class of Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) where the state space is partitioned into exogenous and endogenous components. Exogenous states evolve stochastically, independent of the agent's actions, while…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-02-06 Jia Wan , Sean R. Sinclair , Devavrat Shah , Martin J. Wainwright

A popular perspective in Reinforcement learning (RL) casts the problem as probabilistic inference on a graphical model of the Markov decision process (MDP). The core object of study is the probability of each state-action pair being visited…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-23 Jean Tarbouriech , Tor Lattimore , Brendan O'Donoghue

While most approaches to the problem of Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) focus on estimating a reward function that best explains an expert agent's policy or demonstrated behavior on a control task, it is often the case that such…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-05-01 Dexter R. R. Scobee , S. Shankar Sastry

One of the significant challenges in reinforcement learning (RL) when dealing with noise is estimating latent states from observations. Causality provides rigorous theoretical support for ensuring that the underlying states can be uniquely…

Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has made considerable advances in simulated and physical robot control tasks, especially when problems admit a fully observed Markov Decision Process (MDP) formulation. When observations only partially…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Lingheng Meng , Rob Gorbet , Michael Burke , Dana Kulić

We present BRIEE (Block-structured Representation learning with Interleaved Explore Exploit), an algorithm for efficient reinforcement learning in Markov Decision Processes with block-structured dynamics (i.e., Block MDPs), where rich…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-12 Xuezhou Zhang , Yuda Song , Masatoshi Uehara , Mengdi Wang , Alekh Agarwal , Wen Sun

Measuring states in reinforcement learning (RL) can be costly in real-world settings and may negatively influence future outcomes. We introduce the Actively Observable Markov Decision Process (AOMDP), where an agent not only selects control…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-17 Daiqi Gao , Ziping Xu , Aseel Rawashdeh , Predrag Klasnja , Susan A. Murphy

Traditional reinforcement learning (RL) assumes the agents make decisions based on Markov decision processes (MDPs) with one-step transition models. In many real-world applications, such as energy management and stock investment, agents can…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-22 Chenbei Lu , Zaiwei Chen , Tongxin Li , Chenye Wu , Adam Wierman

We study model-based reinforcement learning (RL) for episodic Markov decision processes (MDP) whose transition probability is parametrized by an unknown transition core with features of state and action. Despite much recent progress in…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-11-19 Taehyun Hwang , Min-hwan Oh

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

In inverse reinforcement learning (IRL), a learning agent infers a reward function encoding the underlying task using demonstrations from experts. However, many existing IRL techniques make the often unrealistic assumption that the agent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-04 Franck Djeumou , Christian Ellis , Murat Cubuktepe , Craig Lennon , Ufuk Topcu