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We introduce the framework of performative reinforcement learning where the policy chosen by the learner affects the underlying reward and transition dynamics of the environment. Following the recent literature on performative…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-08 Debmalya Mandal , Stelios Triantafyllou , Goran Radanovic

We consider episodic reinforcement learning in reward-mixing Markov decision processes (RMMDPs): at the beginning of every episode nature randomly picks a latent reward model among $M$ candidates and an agent interacts with the MDP…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-07 Jeongyeol Kwon , Yonathan Efroni , Constantine Caramanis , Shie Mannor

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated their ability to learn in-context, allowing them to perform various tasks based on a few input-output examples. However, the effectiveness of in-context learning is heavily reliant on the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-01-29 Liang Wang , Nan Yang , Furu Wei

We study reinforcement learning with linear function approximation and finite-memory approximations for partially observed Markov decision processes (POMDPs). We first present an algorithm for the value evaluation of finite-memory feedback…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-05-22 Ali Devran Kara

A key challenge in reward learning from human input is that desired agent behavior often changes based on context. For example, a robot must adapt to avoid a stove once it becomes hot. We observe that while high-level preferences (e.g.,…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-01-14 Alexandra Forsey-Smerek , Julie Shah , Andreea Bobu

In human-in-the-loop reinforcement learning or environments where calculating a reward is expensive, the costly rewards can make learning efficiency challenging to achieve. The cost of obtaining feedback from humans or calculating expensive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-03 Muhammed Yusuf Satici , David L. Roberts

Learning a near optimal policy in a partially observable system remains an elusive challenge in contemporary reinforcement learning. In this work, we consider episodic reinforcement learning in a reward-mixing Markov decision process (MDP).…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-01 Jeongyeol Kwon , Yonathan Efroni , Constantine Caramanis , Shie Mannor

This paper presents a reinforcement learning framework that incorporates a Contextual Reward Machine for task-oriented grasping. The Contextual Reward Machine reduces task complexity by decomposing grasping tasks into manageable sub-tasks.…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-12-12 Hui Li , Akhlak Uz Zaman , Fujian Yan , Hongsheng He

The low rank MDP has emerged as an important model for studying representation learning and exploration in reinforcement learning. With a known representation, several model-free exploration strategies exist. In contrast, all algorithms for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-23 Aditya Modi , Jinglin Chen , Akshay Krishnamurthy , Nan Jiang , Alekh Agarwal

Following the pivotal success of learning strategies to win at tasks, solely by interacting with an environment without any supervision, agents have gained the ability to make sequential decisions in complex MDPs. Yet, reinforcement…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-18 Ezgi Korkmaz

In-context learning is a recent paradigm in natural language understanding, where a large pre-trained language model (LM) observes a test instance and a few training examples as its input, and directly decodes the output without any update…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-05-10 Ohad Rubin , Jonathan Herzig , Jonathan Berant

Real-world reinforcement learning (RL) environments, whether in robotics or industrial settings, often involve non-visual observations and require not only efficient but also reliable and thus interpretable and flexible RL approaches. To…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-19 Moritz Lange , Noah Krystiniak , Raphael C. Engelhardt , Wolfgang Konen , Laurenz Wiskott

Large language models (LLMs) trained on huge corpora of text datasets demonstrate intriguing capabilities, achieving state-of-the-art performance on tasks they were not explicitly trained for. The precise nature of LLM capabilities is often…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-04-17 Eric J. Bigelow , Ekdeep Singh Lubana , Robert P. Dick , Hidenori Tanaka , Tomer D. Ullman

Learning a reward function from demonstrations suffers from low sample-efficiency. Even with abundant data, current inverse reinforcement learning methods that focus on learning from a single environment can fail to handle slight changes in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-15 Thomas Kleine Buening , Victor Villin , Christos Dimitrakakis

Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms struggle with learning optimal policies for tasks where reward feedback is sparse and depends on a complex sequence of events in the environment. Probabilistic reward machines (PRMs) are finite-state…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-20 Jan Corazza , Hadi Partovi Aria , Daniel Neider , Zhe Xu

Despite the empirical success of foundation models, we do not have a systematic characterization of the representations that these models learn. In this paper, we establish the contexture theory. It shows that a large class of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-06 Runtian Zhai , Kai Yang , Che-Ping Tsai , Burak Varici , Zico Kolter , Pradeep Ravikumar

Efficient exploration remains a challenging problem in reinforcement learning, especially for tasks where extrinsic rewards from environments are sparse or even totally disregarded. Significant advances based on intrinsic motivation show…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-03 Chenjia Bai , Peng Liu , Kaiyu Liu , Lingxiao Wang , Yingnan Zhao , Lei Han

We study the problem of deployment efficient reinforcement learning (RL) with linear function approximation under the \emph{reward-free} exploration setting. This is a well-motivated problem because deploying new policies is costly in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-23 Dan Qiao , Yu-Xiang Wang

Contextual MDPs are powerful tools with wide applicability in areas from biostatistics to machine learning. However, specializing them to offline datasets has been challenging due to a lack of robust, theoretically backed methods. Our work…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-06 Riddhiman Bhattacharyya , Sayak Chakrabarty , Imon Banerjee

We consider a simulation optimization problem for a context-dependent decision-making, which aims to determine the top-m designs for all contexts. Under a Bayesian framework, we formulate the optimal dynamic sampling decision as a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-06-12 Gongbo Zhang , Sihua Chen , Kuihua Huang , Yijie Peng