Related papers: Calculus on MDPs: Potential Shaping as a Gradient
One of the central challenges faced by a reinforcement learning (RL) agent is to effectively learn a (near-)optimal policy in environments with large state spaces having sparse and noisy feedback signals. In real-world applications, an…
Recently there has been a proliferation of intrinsic motivation (IM) reward-shaping methods to learn in complex and sparse-reward environments. These methods can often inadvertently change the set of optimal policies in an environment,…
Recently regular decision processes have been proposed as a well-behaved form of non-Markov decision process. Regular decision processes are characterised by a transition function and a reward function that depend on the whole history,…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) models have continually evolved to navigate the exploration - exploitation trade-off in uncertain Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). In this study, I leverage the principles of stochastic thermodynamics and system…
We study offline Reinforcement Learning in large infinite-horizon discounted Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) when the reward and transition models are linearly realizable under a known feature map. Starting from the classic linear-program…
Current reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) pipelines for large language model (LLM) alignment typically assign scalar rewards to sequences, using the final token as a surrogate indicator for the quality of the entire…
We present a new geometric interpretation of Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) with a natural normalization procedure that allows us to adjust the value function at each state without altering the advantage of any action with respect to any…
Reward shaping is a technique in reinforcement learning that addresses the sparse-reward problem by providing more frequent and informative rewards. We introduce a self-adaptive and highly efficient reward shaping mechanism that…
We consider the expressivity of Markov rewards in sequential decision making under uncertainty. We view reward functions in Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) as a means to characterize desired behaviors of agents. Assuming desired behaviors…
In this paper, we consider reinforcement learning of Markov Decision Processes (MDP) with peak constraints, where an agent chooses a policy to optimize an objective and at the same time satisfy additional constraints. The agent has to take…
This paper discusses theoretical and experimental aspects of gradient-based approaches to the direct optimization of policy performance in controlled POMDPs. We introduce GPOMDP, a REINFORCE-like algorithm for estimating an approximation to…
Reinforcement learning often needs to deal with the exponential growth of states and actions when exploring optimal control in high-dimensional spaces (often known as the curse of dimensionality). In this work, we address this issue by…
The automatic synthesis of policies for robotic-control tasks through reinforcement learning relies on a reward signal that simultaneously captures many possibly conflicting requirements. In this paper, we in\-tro\-duce a novel,…
Reinforcement learning (RL) relies heavily on exploration to learn from its environment and maximize observed rewards. Therefore, it is essential to design a reward function that guarantees optimal learning from the received experience.…
In this paper, we consider Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) with error states. Error states are those states entering which is undesirable or dangerous. We define the risk with respect to a policy as the probability of entering such a state…
Markov decision processes (MDPs) with rewards are a widespread and well-studied model for systems that make both probabilistic and nondeterministic choices. A fundamental result about MDPs is that their minimal and maximal expected rewards…
Policy gradient methods are extensively used in reinforcement learning as a way to optimize expected return. In this paper, we explore the evolution of the policy parameters, for a special class of exactly solvable POMDPs, as a…
In this theoretical paper we are concerned with the problem of learning a value function by a smooth general function approximator, to solve a deterministic episodic control problem in a large continuous state space. It is shown that…
The concept of the value-gradient is introduced and developed in the context of reinforcement learning. It is shown that by learning the value-gradients exploration or stochastic behaviour is no longer needed to find locally optimal…
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).…