Related papers: Reinforcement Learning with Exogenous States and R…
We study reward-free and reward-agnostic exploration in episodic finite-horizon Markov decision processes (MDPs), where an agent explores an unknown environment without observing external rewards. Reward-free exploration aims to enable…
Exploration is essential in reinforcement learning as an agent relies on trial and error to learn an optimal policy. However, when rewards are sparse, naive exploration strategies, like noise injection, are often insufficient. Intrinsic…
In previous work, using a process we call meshing, the reachable state spaces for various continuous and hybrid systems were approximated as a discrete set of states which can then be synthesized into a Markov chain. One of the applications…
Reinforcement learning (RL) agents have traditionally been tasked with maximizing the value function of a Markov decision process (MDP), either in continuous settings, with fixed discount factor $\gamma < 1$, or in episodic settings, with…
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…
The curse of dimensionality is a widely known issue in reinforcement learning (RL). In the tabular setting where the state space $\mathcal{S}$ and the action space $\mathcal{A}$ are both finite, to obtain a nearly optimal policy with…
We study risk-sensitive reinforcement learning (RL) based on an entropic risk measure in episodic non-stationary Markov decision processes (MDPs). Both the reward functions and the state transition kernels are unknown and allowed to vary…
Solving tasks with sparse rewards is one of the most important challenges in reinforcement learning. In the single-agent setting, this challenge is addressed by introducing intrinsic rewards that motivate agents to explore unseen regions of…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) has gained substantial attention across diverse application domains and theoretical investigations. Existing literature on RL theory largely focuses on risk-neutral settings where the decision-maker learns to…
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…
In many RL applications, once training ends, it is vital to detect any deterioration in the agent performance as soon as possible. Furthermore, it often has to be done without modifying the policy and under minimal assumptions regarding the…
This paper presents a reinforcement learning framework that incorporates a Contextual Reward Machine for task-oriented grasping. The Contextual Reward Machine reduces task complexity by decomposing grasping tasks into manageable sub-tasks.…
Many practical applications of reinforcement learning require agents to learn from sparse and delayed rewards. It challenges the ability of agents to attribute their actions to future outcomes. In this paper, we consider the problem…
We propose RUDDER, a novel reinforcement learning approach for delayed rewards in finite Markov decision processes (MDPs). In MDPs the Q-values are equal to the expected immediate reward plus the expected future rewards. The latter are…
A recent goal in the Reinforcement Learning (RL) framework is to choose a sequence of actions or a policy to maximize the reward collected or minimize the regret incurred in a finite time horizon. For several RL problems in operation…
Much of the current work on reinforcement learning studies episodic settings, where the agent is reset between trials to an initial state distribution, often with well-shaped reward functions. Non-episodic settings, where the agent must…
We address the problem of reinforcement learning in which observations may exhibit an arbitrary form of stochastic dependence on past observations and actions, i.e. environments more general than (PO)MDPs. The task for an agent is to attain…
Reinforcement learning (RL) is currently one of the most prominent methods for optimizing dynamical systems, with breakthrough results across various fields. The framework is based on the concept of a Markov decision process (MDP), leading…
In this paper, we use concepts from supervisory control theory of discrete event systems to propose a method to learn optimal control policies for a finite-state Markov Decision Process (MDP) in which (only) certain sequences of actions are…
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…