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Related papers: Lower Bounds for Learning in Revealing POMDPs

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Reinforcement learning in partially observed Markov decision processes (POMDPs) faces two challenges. (i) It often takes the full history to predict the future, which induces a sample complexity that scales exponentially with the horizon.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-02 Lingxiao Wang , Qi Cai , Zhuoran Yang , Zhaoran Wang

Reinforcement Learning (RL) serves as a versatile framework for sequential decision-making, finding applications across diverse domains such as robotics, autonomous driving, recommendation systems, supply chain optimization, biology,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-26 Vaneet Aggarwal , Washim Uddin Mondal , Qinbo Bai

In most real-world reinforcement learning applications, state information is only partially observable, which breaks the Markov decision process assumption and leads to inferior performance for algorithms that conflate observations with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-12 Hongming Zhang , Tongzheng Ren , Chenjun Xiao , Dale Schuurmans , Bo Dai

Several practical applications of reinforcement learning involve an agent learning from past data without the possibility of further exploration. Often these applications require us to 1) identify a near optimal policy or to 2) estimate the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-22 Andrea Zanette

Reinforcement learning with function approximation has recently achieved tremendous results in applications with large state spaces. This empirical success has motivated a growing body of theoretical work proposing necessary and sufficient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-05 Daniel Kane , Sihan Liu , Shachar Lovett , Gaurav Mahajan

This work studies the problem of batch off-policy evaluation for Reinforcement Learning in partially observable environments. Off-policy evaluation under partial observability is inherently prone to bias, with risk of arbitrarily large…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-26 Guy Tennenholtz , Shie Mannor , Uri Shalit

We consider online reinforcement learning (RL) in episodic Markov decision processes (MDPs) under the linear $q^\pi$-realizability assumption, where it is assumed that the action-values of all policies can be expressed as linear functions…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-21 Gellért Weisz , András György , Csaba Szepesvári

We study the offline reinforcement learning (RL) in the face of unmeasured confounders. Due to the lack of online interaction with the environment, offline RL is facing the following two significant challenges: (i) the agent may be…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-20 Zuyue Fu , Zhengling Qi , Zhaoran Wang , Zhuoran Yang , Yanxun Xu , Michael R. Kosorok

Real-world applications of reinforcement learning often involve environments where agents operate on complex, high-dimensional observations, but the underlying (''latent'') dynamics are comparatively simple. However, outside of restrictive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-24 Philip Amortila , Dylan J. Foster , Nan Jiang , Akshay Krishnamurthy , Zakaria Mhammedi

The curse of dimensionality renders Reinforcement Learning (RL) impractical in many real-world settings with exponentially large state and action spaces. Yet, many environments exhibit exploitable structure that can accelerate learning. To…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-16 Thomas van Vuren , Fiona Sloothaak , Maarten G. Wolf , Jaron Sanders

We propose an epoch-based reinforcement learning algorithm for infinite-horizon average-cost Markov decision processes (MDPs) that leverages a partial order over a policy class. In this structure, $\pi' \leq \pi$ if data collected under…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-08-07 Zhongjun Zhang , Shipra Agrawal , Ilan Lobel , Sean R. Sinclair , Christina Lee Yu

In reward-free reinforcement learning (RL), an agent explores the environment first without any reward information, in order to achieve certain learning goals afterwards for any given reward. In this paper we focus on reward-free RL under…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-21 Yuan Cheng , Ruiquan Huang , Jing Yang , Yingbin Liang

Despite rapid progress in theoretical reinforcement learning (RL) over the last few years, most of the known guarantees are worst-case in nature, failing to take advantage of structure that may be known a priori about a given RL problem at…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-26 Noah Golowich , Ankur Moitra

Reinforcement learning would enjoy better success on real-world problems if domain knowledge could be imparted to the algorithm by the modelers. Most problems have both hidden state and unknown dynamics. Partially observable Markov decision…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2013-01-07 Christian R. Shelton

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

Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs) are a natural and general model in reinforcement learning that take into account the agent's uncertainty about its current state. In the literature on POMDPs, it is customary to assume…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-24 Noah Golowich , Ankur Moitra , Dhruv Rohatgi

This work studies offline Reinforcement Learning (RL) in a class of non-Markovian environments called Regular Decision Processes (RDPs). In RDPs, the unknown dependency of future observations and rewards from the past interactions can be…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-05 Ahana Deb , Roberto Cipollone , Anders Jonsson , Alessandro Ronca , Mohammad Sadegh Talebi

In probably approximately correct (PAC) reinforcement learning (RL), an agent is required to identify an $\epsilon$-optimal policy with probability $1-\delta$. While minimax optimal algorithms exist for this problem, its instance-dependent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-25 Andrea Tirinzoni , Aymen Al-Marjani , Emilie Kaufmann

This paper delves into the problem of safe reinforcement learning (RL) in a partially observable environment with the aim of achieving safe-reachability objectives. In traditional partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDP),…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-04 Xiaoyuan Cheng , Boli Chen , Liz Varga , Yukun Hu

General-purpose, intelligent, learning agents cycle through sequences of observations, actions, and rewards that are complex, uncertain, unknown, and non-Markovian. On the other hand, reinforcement learning is well-developed for small…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2009-12-30 Marcus Hutter