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Related papers: Policy Dispersion in Non-Markovian Environment

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General purpose intelligent learning agents cycle through (complex,non-MDP) sequences of observations, actions, and rewards. On the other hand, reinforcement learning is well-developed for small finite state Markov Decision Processes…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2009-12-30 Marcus Hutter

This paper examines a number of solution methods for decision processes with non-Markovian rewards (NMRDPs). They all exploit a temporal logic specification of the reward function to automatically translate the NMRDP into an equivalent…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2012-12-12 Charles Gretton , David Price , Sylvie Thiebaux

This paper considers a multi-agent Markov Decision Process (MDP), where there are $n$ agents and each agent $i$ is associated with a state $s_i$ and action $a_i$ taking values from a finite set. Though the global state space size and action…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-09-17 Guannan Qu , Na Li

The standard RL world model is that of a Markov Decision Process (MDP). A basic premise of MDPs is that the rewards depend on the last state and action only. Yet, many real-world rewards are non-Markovian. For example, a reward for bringing…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2019-12-06 Maor Gaon , Ronen I. Brafman

A popular approach to solving a decision process with non-Markovian rewards (NMRDP) is to exploit a compact representation of the reward function to automatically translate the NMRDP into an equivalent Markov decision process (MDP) amenable…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2013-01-07 Sylvie Thiebaux , Froduald Kabanza , John Slanley

Finding different solutions to the same problem is a key aspect of intelligence associated with creativity and adaptation to novel situations. In reinforcement learning, a set of diverse policies can be useful for exploration, transfer,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-01-05 Tom Zahavy , Brendan O'Donoghue , Andre Barreto , Volodymyr Mnih , Sebastian Flennerhag , Satinder Singh

Policy gradient methods are among the most effective methods in challenging reinforcement learning problems with large state and/or action spaces. However, little is known about even their most basic theoretical convergence properties,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-16 Alekh Agarwal , Sham M. Kakade , Jason D. Lee , Gaurav Mahajan

Many real-world decision-making problems face the off-dynamics challenge: the agent learns a policy in a source domain and deploys it in a target domain with different state transitions. The distributionally robust Markov decision process…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-26 Zhishuai Liu , Pan Xu

A fundamental assumption of reinforcement learning in Markov decision processes (MDPs) is that the relevant decision process is, in fact, Markov. However, when MDPs have rich observations, agents typically learn by way of an abstract state…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-18 Cameron Allen , Neev Parikh , Omer Gottesman , George Konidaris

Non-stationary environments are challenging for reinforcement learning algorithms. If the state transition and/or reward functions change based on latent factors, the agent is effectively tasked with optimizing a behavior that maximizes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-21 Lucas N. Alegre , Ana L. C. Bazzan , Bruno C. da Silva

The goal of this paper is to analyze distributional Markov Decision Processes as a class of control problems in which the objective is to learn policies that steer the distribution of a cumulative reward toward a prescribed target law,…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-02-09 Nicole Bäuerle , Athanasios Vasileiadis

We consider problems in sequential decision making with natural multi-level structure, where sub-tasks are assembled together to accomplish complex goals. Systematically inferring and leveraging hierarchical structure has remained a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-11 Sichen Yang , Mauro Maggioni

A central task in control theory, artificial intelligence, and formal methods is to synthesize reward-maximizing strategies for agents that operate in partially unknown environments. In environments modeled by gray-box Markov decision…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-25 Christel Baier , Clemens Dubslaff , Patrick Wienhöft , Stefan J. Kiebel

This paper proposes a formal approach to online learning and planning for agents operating in a priori unknown, time-varying environments. The proposed method computes the maximally likely model of the environment, given the observations…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-09 Melkior Ornik , Ufuk Topcu

Conventional imitation learning assumes access to the actions of demonstrators, but these motor signals are often non-observable in naturalistic settings. Additionally, sequential decision-making behaviors in these settings can deviate from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-31 Aoyang Qin , Feng Gao , Qing Li , Song-Chun Zhu , Sirui Xie

Value decomposition has long been a fundamental technique in multi-agent dynamic programming and reinforcement learning (RL). Specifically, the value function of a global state $(s_1,s_2,\ldots,s_N)$ is often approximated as the sum of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-14 Shuze Chen , Tianyi Peng

A Markov Decision Process (MDP) is a popular model for reinforcement learning. However, its commonly used assumption of stationary dynamics and rewards is too stringent and fails to hold in adversarial, nonstationary, or multi-agent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-08-22 Tiancheng Yu , Suvrit Sra

In this paper we consider the problem of how a reinforcement learning agent tasked with solving a set of related Markov decision processes can use knowledge acquired early in its lifetime to improve its ability to more rapidly solve novel,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2019-02-26 Francisco M. Garcia , Bruno C. da Silva , Philip S. Thomas

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

This paper presents a state representation framework for Markov decision processes (MDPs) that can be learned solely from state trajectories, requiring neither reward signals nor the actions executed by the agent. We propose learning the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-25 Lorenzo Steccanella , Joshua B. Evans , Özgür Şimşek , Anders Jonsson