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A key question in reinforcement learning is how an intelligent agent can generalize knowledge across different inputs. By generalizing across different inputs, information learned for one input can be immediately reused for improving…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-06 Lucas Lehnert , Michael L. Littman

Standard reinforcement learning algorithms with a single policy perform poorly on tasks in complex environments involving sparse rewards, diverse behaviors, or long-term planning. This led to the study of algorithms that incorporate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-23 Ranga Shaarad Ayyagari , Anurita Ghosh , Ambedkar Dukkipati

Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) often exhibit significant redundancy due to symmetries and shared structure across state-goal pairs in real-world Goal-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning (GCRL). While hierarchical policies have been…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Clarisse Wibault , Alexander Goldie , Antonio Villares , Maike Osborne , Jakob Foerster

Forward-backward (FB) representations provide a powerful framework for learning the successor representation (SR) in continuous spaces by enforcing a low-rank factorization. However, a fundamental spectral mismatch often exists between the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Seyed Mahdi B. Azad , Jasper Hoffmann , Iman Nematollahi , Hao Zhu , Abhinav Valada , Joschka Boedecker

Decision-making in complex, continuous multi-task environments is often hindered by the difficulty of obtaining accurate models for planning and the inefficiency of learning purely from trial and error. While precise environment dynamics…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-20 Jeff Jewett , Sandhya Saisubramanian

Temporal abstraction allows reinforcement learning agents to represent knowledge and develop strategies over different temporal scales. The option-critic framework has been demonstrated to learn temporally extended actions, represented as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-21 Anand Kamat , Doina Precup

Automatic data abstraction is an important capability for both benchmarking machine intelligence and supporting summarization applications. In the former one asks whether a machine can `understand' enough about the meaning of input data to…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2019-08-09 Umar Riaz Muhammad , Yongxin Yang , Timothy M. Hospedales , Tao Xiang , Yi-Zhe Song

Transfer reinforcement learning aims to improve the sample efficiency of solving unseen new tasks by leveraging experiences obtained from previous tasks. We consider the setting where all tasks (MDPs) share the same environment dynamic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-08 Kaige Yang

Real-world sequential decision-making often involves parameterized action spaces that require both, decisions regarding discrete actions and decisions about continuous action parameters governing how an action is executed. Existing…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-27 Rashmeet Kaur Nayyar , Naman Shah , Siddharth Srivastava

Abstraction of Markov Decision Processes is a useful tool for solving complex problems, as it can ignore unimportant aspects of an environment, simplifying the process of learning an optimal policy. In this paper, we propose a new algorithm…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-20 Ondrej Biza , Robert Platt

In reinforcement learning, temporal difference-based algorithms can be sample-inefficient: for instance, with sparse rewards, no learning occurs until a reward is observed. This can be remedied by learning richer objects, such as a model of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-19 Léonard Blier , Corentin Tallec , Yann Ollivier

One question central to Reinforcement Learning is how to learn a feature representation that supports algorithm scaling and re-use of learned information from different tasks. Successor Features approach this problem by learning a feature…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-08-02 Lucas Lehnert , Stefanie Tellex , Michael L. Littman

Many methods for Model-based Reinforcement learning (MBRL) in Markov decision processes (MDPs) provide guarantees for both the accuracy of the model they can deliver and the learning efficiency. At the same time, state abstraction…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-16 Rolf A. N. Starre , Marco Loog , Elena Congeduti , Frans A. Oliehoek

Many researchers have explored methods for hierarchical reinforcement learning (RL) with temporal abstractions, in which abstract actions are defined that can perform many primitive actions before terminating. However, little is known about…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2007-05-23 Thomas G. Dietterich

Successor-style representations have many advantages for reinforcement learning: for example, they can help an agent generalize from past experience to new goals, and they have been proposed as explanations of behavioral and neural data…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-17 Kianté Brantley , Soroush Mehri , Geoffrey J. Gordon

Abstraction is a desirable capability for deep learning models, which means to induce abstract concepts from concrete instances and flexibly apply them beyond the learning context. At the same time, there is a lack of clear understanding…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-24 Shengnan An , Zeqi Lin , Bei Chen , Qiang Fu , Nanning Zheng , Jian-Guang Lou

Inspired by human conscious planning, we propose Skipper, a model-based reinforcement learning framework utilizing spatio-temporal abstractions to generalize better in novel situations. It automatically decomposes the given task into…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-03-19 Mingde Zhao , Safa Alver , Harm van Seijen , Romain Laroche , Doina Precup , Yoshua Bengio

In the face of difficult exploration problems in reinforcement learning, we study whether giving an agent an object-centric mapping (describing a set of items and their attributes) allow for more efficient learning. We found this problem is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-15 Anthony GX-Chen , Kenneth Marino , Rob Fergus

Model-based reinforcement learning (RL) is appealing because (i) it enables planning and thus more strategic exploration, and (ii) by decoupling dynamics from rewards, it enables fast transfer to new reward functions. However, learning an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-14 Evan Zheran Liu , Ramtin Keramati , Sudarshan Seshadri , Kelvin Guu , Panupong Pasupat , Emma Brunskill , Percy Liang

While humans readily generalize abstract concepts to more complex or larger tasks, building Reinforcement Learning (RL) systems with this ability remains elusive. Here, we present the first theoretical model of how such Out-of-Distribution…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Nasehatul Mustakim , Lucas Lehnert