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Related papers: Active Coverage for PAC Reinforcement Learning

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Exploration is an essential part of reinforcement learning, which restricts the quality of learned policy. Hard-exploration environments are defined by huge state space and sparse rewards. In such conditions, an exhaustive exploration of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-22 Leonid Ugadiarov , Alexey Skrynnik , Aleksandr I. Panov

For the problem of task-agnostic reinforcement learning (RL), an agent first collects samples from an unknown environment without the supervision of reward signals, then is revealed with a reward and is asked to compute a corresponding…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-16 Jingfeng Wu , Vladimir Braverman , Lin F. Yang

Targeted and deliberate exploration of state--action pairs is essential in reward-free Markov Decision Problems (MDPs). More precisely, different state-action pairs exhibit different degree of importance or difficulty which must be actively…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-21 Xihe Gu , Urbashi Mitra , Tara Javidi

Exploration has been a crucial part of reinforcement learning, yet several important questions concerning exploration efficiency are still not answered satisfactorily by existing analytical frameworks. These questions include exploration…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-12-06 Liangpeng Zhang , Ke Tang , Xin Yao

We consider offline Reinforcement Learning (RL), where the agent does not interact with the environment and must rely on offline data collected using a behavior policy. Previous works provide policy evaluation guarantees when the target…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-26 Xumei Xi , Christina Lee Yu , Yudong Chen

Markov decision processes (MDPs) are a well studied framework for solving sequential decision making problems under uncertainty. Exact methods for solving MDPs based on dynamic programming such as policy iteration and value iteration are…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2015-09-09 Yanping Huang

In supervised learning, we fit a single statistical model to a given data set, assuming that the data is associated with a singular task, which yields well-tuned models for specific use, but does not adapt well to new contexts. By contrast,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-09-11 Bingjia Wang , Alec Koppel , Vikram Krishnamurthy

We study the reinforcement learning (RL) problem in a constrained Markov decision process (CMDP), where an agent explores the environment to maximize the expected cumulative reward while satisfying a single constraint on the expected total…

Many potential applications of reinforcement learning (RL) are stymied by the large numbers of samples required to learn an effective policy. This is especially true when applying RL to real-world control tasks, e.g. in the sciences or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-11 Viraj Mehta , Ian Char , Joseph Abbate , Rory Conlin , Mark D. Boyer , Stefano Ermon , Jeff Schneider , Willie Neiswanger

We propose and study a new model for reinforcement learning with rich observations, generalizing contextual bandits to sequential decision making. These models require an agent to take actions based on observations (features) with the goal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-10-31 Akshay Krishnamurthy , Alekh Agarwal , John Langford

One of the challenges in online reinforcement learning (RL) is that the agent needs to trade off the exploration of the environment and the exploitation of the samples to optimize its behavior. Whether we optimize for regret, sample…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-19 Jean Tarbouriech , Matteo Pirotta , Michal Valko , Alessandro Lazaric

Constrained decision-making is essential for designing safe policies in real-world control systems, yet simulated environments often fail to capture real-world adversities. We consider the problem of learning a policy that will maximize the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Sourav Ganguly , Kishan Panaganti , Arnob Ghosh , Adam Wierman

Count-based exploration algorithms are known to perform near-optimally when used in conjunction with tabular reinforcement learning (RL) methods for solving small discrete Markov decision processes (MDPs). It is generally thought that…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-12-06 Haoran Tang , Rein Houthooft , Davis Foote , Adam Stooke , Xi Chen , Yan Duan , John Schulman , Filip De Turck , Pieter Abbeel

Learning a near optimal policy in a partially observable system remains an elusive challenge in contemporary reinforcement learning. In this work, we consider episodic reinforcement learning in a reward-mixing Markov decision process (MDP).…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-01 Jeongyeol Kwon , Yonathan Efroni , Constantine Caramanis , Shie Mannor

In the optimization of dynamic systems, the variables typically have constraints. Such problems can be modeled as a Constrained Markov Decision Process (CMDP). This paper considers the peak Constrained Markov Decision Process (PCMDP), where…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-06-15 Qinbo Bai , Vaneet Aggarwal , Ather Gattami

When data is scarce or mistakes are costly, average-case metrics fall short. What a practitioner needs is a guarantee: with probability at least $1-\delta$, the learned policy is $\varepsilon$-close to optimal after $N$ episodes. This is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Joshua Steier

The exploration-exploitation dilemma in reinforcement learning (RL) is a fundamental challenge to efficient RL algorithms. Existing algorithms for finite state and action discounted RL problems address this by assuming sufficient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-09 Caleb Ju , Guanghui Lan

We investigate the classical active pure exploration problem in Markov Decision Processes, where the agent sequentially selects actions and, from the resulting system trajectory, aims at identifying the best policy as fast as possible. We…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-10-26 Aymen Al Marjani , Aurélien Garivier , Alexandre Proutiere

Current deep reinforcement learning (DRL) algorithms utilize randomness in simulation environments to assume complete coverage in the state space. However, particularly in high dimensions, relying on randomness may lead to gaps in coverage…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-02 Arpan Kusari

Ensuring safety in Reinforcement Learning (RL), typically framed as a Constrained Markov Decision Process (CMDP), is crucial for real-world exploration applications. Current approaches in handling CMDP struggle to balance optimality and…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-03-07 Zhaorun Chen , Zhuokai Zhao , Tairan He , Binhao Chen , Xuhao Zhao , Liang Gong , Chengliang Liu