Related papers: Act-Then-Measure: Reinforcement Learning for Parti…
In standard Reinforcement Learning (RL) settings, the interaction between the agent and the environment is typically modeled as a Markov Decision Process (MDP), which assumes that the agent observes the system state instantaneously, selects…
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…
Training reinforcement learning (RL) agents using scalar reward signals is often infeasible when an environment has sparse and non-Markovian rewards. Moreover, handcrafting these reward functions before training is prone to…
Reinforcement learning (RL) approaches based on Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) are predominantly applied in the robot joint space, often relying on limited task-specific information and partial awareness of the 3D environment. In…
We are interested in enabling autonomous agents to learn and reason about systems with hidden states, such as locking mechanisms. We cast this problem as learning the parameters of a discrete Partially Observable Markov Decision Process…
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…
We present exact algorithms for identifying deterministic-actions effects and preconditions in dynamic partially observable domains. They apply when one does not know the action model(the way actions affect the world) of a domain and must…
This paper addresses the problem of learning control policies for mobile robots, modeled as unknown Markov Decision Processes (MDPs), that are tasked with temporal logic missions, such as sequencing, coverage, or surveillance. The MDP…
We consider apprenticeship learning, i.e., having an agent learn a task by observing an expert demonstrating the task in a partially observable environment when the model of the environment is uncertain. This setting is useful in…
We consider the reinforcement learning problem for partially observed Markov decision processes (POMDPs) with large or even countably infinite state spaces, where the controller has access to only noisy observations of the underlying…
Attention control is a key cognitive ability for humans to select information relevant to the current task. This paper develops a computational model of attention and an algorithm for attention-based probabilistic planning in Markov…
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…
Robust Markov decision processes (r-MDPs) extend MDPs by explicitly modelling epistemic uncertainty about transition dynamics. Learning r-MDPs from interactions with an unknown environment enables the synthesis of robust policies with…
In many robotic applications, some aspects of the system dynamics can be modeled accurately while others are difficult to obtain or model. We present a novel reinforcement learning (RL) method for continuous state and action spaces that…
Partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) provide an elegant mathematical framework for modeling complex decision and planning problems in stochastic domains in which states of the system are observable only indirectly, via a…
In many practical applications, decision-making processes must balance the costs of acquiring information with the benefits it provides. Traditional control systems often assume full observability, an unrealistic assumption when…
Assessing the systemic effects of uncertainty that arises from agents' partial observation of the true states of the world is critical for understanding a wide range of scenarios. Yet, previous modeling work on agent learning and…
The standard Markov Decision Process (MDP) formulation hinges on the assumption that an action is executed immediately after it was chosen. However, assuming it is often unrealistic and can lead to catastrophic failures in applications such…
A tenet of reinforcement learning is that the agent always observes rewards. However, this is not true in many realistic settings, e.g., a human observer may not always be available to provide rewards, sensors may be limited or…
POMDPs capture a broad class of decision making problems, but hardness results suggest that learning is intractable even in simple settings due to the inherent partial observability. However, in many realistic problems, more information is…