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Reinforcement learning algorithms are typically designed for generic Markov Decision Processes (MDPs), where any state-action pair can lead to an arbitrary transition distribution. In many practical systems, however, only a subset of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-05 Davide Maran , Davide Salaorni , Marcello Restelli

To overcome the curse of dimensionality and curse of modeling in Dynamic Programming (DP) methods for solving classical Markov Decision Process (MDP) problems, Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms are popular. In this paper, we consider…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-11-29 Arghyadip Roy , Vivek Borkar , Abhay Karandikar , Prasanna Chaporkar

In reinforcement learning (RL), when defining a Markov Decision Process (MDP), the environment dynamics is implicitly assumed to be stationary. This assumption of stationarity, while simplifying, can be unrealistic in many scenarios. In the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-15 Shagun Sodhani , Franziska Meier , Joelle Pineau , Amy Zhang

The performance of reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms is sensitive to the choice of hyperparameters, with the learning rate being particularly influential. RL algorithms fail to reach convergence or demand an extensive number of samples…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-09 Aida Afshar , Aldo Pacchiano

Linear Temporal Logic (LTL) is widely used to specify high-level objectives for system policies, and it is highly desirable for autonomous systems to learn the optimal policy with respect to such specifications. However, learning the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-26 Daqian Shao , Marta Kwiatkowska

Data selection for finetuning Large Language Models (LLMs) can be framed as a budget-constrained optimization problem: maximizing a model's downstream performance under a strict training data budget. Solving this problem is generally…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-01 Animesh Jha , Harshit Gupta , Ananjan Nandi

Deploying reinforcement learning policies in the real world requires adapting to time-varying environments. We study this problem in the contextual Markov Decision Process (cMDP) framework, where a family of environments is indexed by a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-04 Param Budhraja , Aditya Gangrade , Alex Olshevsky , Venkatesh Saligrama

Credit assignment in Meta-reinforcement learning (Meta-RL) is still poorly understood. Existing methods either neglect credit assignment to pre-adaptation behavior or implement it naively. This leads to poor sample-efficiency during…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-14 Jonas Rothfuss , Dennis Lee , Ignasi Clavera , Tamim Asfour , Pieter Abbeel

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…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-07-13 Yiannis Kantaros

We address the problem of computing reliable policies in reinforcement learning problems with limited data. In particular, we compute policies that achieve good returns with high confidence when deployed. This objective, known as the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-01 Bahram Behzadian , Reazul Hasan Russel , Marek Petrik , Chin Pang Ho

Policy gradient is a widely utilized and foundational algorithm in the field of reinforcement learning (RL). Renowned for its convergence guarantees and stability compared to other RL algorithms, its practical application is often hindered…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-12 Yunxiang Li , Rui Yuan , Chen Fan , Mark Schmidt , Samuel Horváth , Robert M. Gower , Martin Takáč

We study the problem of selecting a small, representative action subset from an extremely large action space shared across a family of reinforcement learning (RL) environments -- a fundamental challenge in applications like inventory…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-01 Quan Zhou , Shie Mannor

We consider a context-dependent Reinforcement Learning (RL) setting, which is characterized by: a) an unknown finite number of not directly observable contexts; b) abrupt (discontinuous) context changes occurring during an episode; and c)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-15 Hang Ren , Aivar Sootla , Taher Jafferjee , Junxiao Shen , Jun Wang , Haitham Bou-Ammar

We study the offline data-driven sequential decision making problem in the framework of Markov decision process (MDP). In order to enhance the generalizability and adaptivity of the learned policy, we propose to evaluate each policy by a…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2021-11-11 Zhengling Qi , Peng Liao

Markov decision processes (MDPs) are used to model a wide variety of applications ranging from game playing over robotics to finance. Their optimal policy typically maximizes the expected sum of rewards given at each step of the decision…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-26 Maximilian Nägele , Jan Olle , Thomas Fösel , Remmy Zen , Florian Marquardt

Reinforcement learning in non-stationary environments is challenging due to abrupt and unpredictable changes in dynamics, often causing traditional algorithms to fail to converge. However, in many real-world cases, non-stationarity has some…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-25 Mohsen Amiri , Sindri Magnússon

Following the pivotal success of learning strategies to win at tasks, solely by interacting with an environment without any supervision, agents have gained the ability to make sequential decisions in complex MDPs. Yet, reinforcement…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-18 Ezgi Korkmaz

We are interested in learning models of non-stationary environments, which can be framed as a multi-task learning problem. Model-free reinforcement learning algorithms can achieve good asymptotic performance in multi-task learning at a cost…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-24 Elahe Aghapour , Nora Ayanian

General agents have given rise to phenomenal applications such as OpenClaw and Claude Code. As these agent systems (a.k.a. Harnesses) strive for bolder goals, they demand increasingly stronger agentic capabilities from foundation Large…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Daoyu Wang , Qingchuan Li , Mingyue Cheng , Jie Ouyang , Shuo Yu , Qi Liu , Enhong Chen

Modern meta-reinforcement learning (Meta-RL) methods are mainly developed based on model-agnostic meta-learning, which performs policy gradient steps across tasks to maximize policy performance. However, the gradient conflict problem is…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-09-22 Haozhi Wang , Qing Wang , Yunfeng Shao , Dong Li , Jianye Hao , Yinchuan Li