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In safe Reinforcement Learning (RL), safety cost is typically defined as a function dependent on the immediate state and actions. In practice, safety constraints can often be non-Markovian due to the insufficient fidelity of state…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-07 Siow Meng Low , Akshat Kumar

This paper presents a novel approach to Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) that combines cooperative task decomposition with the learning of reward machines (RMs) encoding the structure of the sub-tasks. The proposed method helps…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-02-17 Leo Ardon , Daniel Furelos-Blanco , Alessandra Russo

A central object of study in Reinforcement Learning (RL) is the Markovian policy, in which an agent's actions are chosen from a memoryless probability distribution, conditioned only on its current state. The family of Markovian policies is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-30 Romain Laroche , Remi Tachet des Combes , Jacob Buckman

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

Non-Markovian Reinforcement Learning (RL) tasks present significant challenges, as agents must reason over entire trajectories of state-action pairs to make optimal decisions. A common strategy to address this is through symbolic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-24 Hazem Dewidar , Elena Umili

Exploration in environments with sparse rewards has been a persistent problem in reinforcement learning (RL). Many tasks are natural to specify with a sparse reward, and manually shaping a reward function can result in suboptimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-02-27 Ashvin Nair , Bob McGrew , Marcin Andrychowicz , Wojciech Zaremba , Pieter Abbeel

We consider the problem of finding optimal policies for a Markov Decision Process with almost sure constraints on state transitions and action triplets. We define value and action-value functions that satisfy a barrier-based decomposition…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-25 Agustin Castellano , Juan Bazerque , Enrique Mallada

Natural and formal languages provide an effective mechanism for humans to specify instructions and reward functions. We investigate how to generate policies via RL when reward functions are specified in a symbolic language captured by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-24 Andrew C. Li , Zizhao Chen , Pashootan Vaezipoor , Toryn Q. Klassen , Rodrigo Toro Icarte , Sheila A. McIlraith

Reinforcement learning (RL) methods learn optimal decisions in the presence of a stationary environment. However, the stationary assumption on the environment is very restrictive. In many real world problems like traffic signal control,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-08 Sindhu Padakandla , Prabuchandran K. J , Shalabh Bhatnagar

Reinforcement Learning (RL) can enable agents to learn complex tasks. However, it is difficult to interpret the knowledge and reuse it across tasks. Inductive biases can address such issues by explicitly providing generic yet useful…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-12-13 Thomas Schnürer , Malte Probst , Horst-Michael Gross

Explaining the behaviour of intelligent agents learned by reinforcement learning (RL) to humans is challenging yet crucial due to their incomprehensible proprioceptive states, variational intermediate goals, and resultant unpredictability.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-07 Wenhao Lu , Xufeng Zhao , Sven Magg , Martin Gromniak , Mengdi Li , Stefan Wermter

The success of Reinforcement Learning (RL) heavily relies on the ability to learn robust representations from the observations of the environment. In most cases, the representations learned purely by the reinforcement learning loss can…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-12 Somjit Nath , Rushiv Arora , Samira Ebrahimi Kahou

Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms allow artificial agents to improve their selection of actions to increase rewarding experiences in their environments. Temporal Difference (TD) Learning -- a model-free RL method -- is a leading…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-09-05 Jacob Rafati , David C. Noelle

Reward Machines (RMs) are an established mechanism in Reinforcement Learning (RL) to represent and learn sparse, temporally extended tasks with non-Markovian rewards. RMs rely on high-level information in the form of labels that are emitted…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-04 Thomas Krug , Daniel Neider

Reward machines (RMs) provide a structured way to specify non-Markovian rewards in reinforcement learning (RL), thereby improving both expressiveness and programmability. Viewed more broadly, they separate what is known about the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-21 Daniel Ajeleye , Ashutosh Trivedi , Majid Zamani

Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms assume that users specify tasks by manually writing down a reward function. However, this process can be laborious and demands considerable technical expertise. Can we devise RL algorithms that instead…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-03 Benjamin Eysenbach , Sergey Levine , Ruslan Salakhutdinov

Representations are at the core of all deep reinforcement learning (RL) methods for both Markov decision processes (MDPs) and partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs). Many representation learning methods and theoretical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-23 Tianwei Ni , Benjamin Eysenbach , Erfan Seyedsalehi , Michel Ma , Clement Gehring , Aditya Mahajan , Pierre-Luc Bacon

Recent advances in reinforcement learning (RL) have shown much promise across a variety of applications. However, issues such as scalability, explainability, and Markovian assumptions limit its applicability in certain domains. We observe…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-17 Kaustuv Mukherji , Devendra Parkar , Lahari Pokala , Dyuman Aditya , Paulo Shakarian , Clark Dorman

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a powerful technique for training intelligent agents, but understanding why these agents make specific decisions can be quite challenging. This lack of transparency in RL models has been a long-standing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-02 Wenhao Lu , Xufeng Zhao , Thilo Fryen , Jae Hee Lee , Mengdi Li , Sven Magg , Stefan Wermter

Reward is the driving force for reinforcement-learning agents. This paper is dedicated to understanding the expressivity of reward as a way to capture tasks that we would want an agent to perform. We frame this study around three new…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-19 David Abel , Will Dabney , Anna Harutyunyan , Mark K. Ho , Michael L. Littman , Doina Precup , Satinder Singh