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In many practical uses of reinforcement learning (RL) the set of actions available at a given state is a random variable, with realizations governed by an exogenous stochastic process. Somewhat surprisingly, the foundations for such…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-02-16 Craig Boutilier , Alon Cohen , Amit Daniely , Avinatan Hassidim , Yishay Mansour , Ofer Meshi , Martin Mladenov , Dale Schuurmans

Reward-free exploration is a reinforcement learning setting studied by Jin et al. (2020), who address it by running several algorithms with regret guarantees in parallel. In our work, we instead give a more natural adaptive approach for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-08 Emilie Kaufmann , Pierre Ménard , Omar Darwiche Domingues , Anders Jonsson , Edouard Leurent , Michal Valko

In reward-free reinforcement learning (RL), an agent explores the environment first without any reward information, in order to achieve certain learning goals afterwards for any given reward. In this paper we focus on reward-free RL under…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-21 Yuan Cheng , Ruiquan Huang , Jing Yang , Yingbin Liang

Sample-efficient exploration is crucial not only for discovering rewarding experiences but also for adapting to environment changes in a task-agnostic fashion. A principled treatment of the problem of optimal input synthesis for system…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-10 Matthias Schultheis , Boris Belousov , Hany Abdulsamad , Jan Peters

A popular perspective in Reinforcement learning (RL) casts the problem as probabilistic inference on a graphical model of the Markov decision process (MDP). The core object of study is the probability of each state-action pair being visited…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-23 Jean Tarbouriech , Tor Lattimore , Brendan O'Donoghue

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Alireza Kazemipour , Simone Parisi , Matthew E. Taylor , Michael Bowling

A precondition for the deployment of a Reinforcement Learning agent to a real-world system is to provide guarantees on the learning process. While a learning algorithm will eventually converge to a good policy, there are no guarantees on…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-12-27 Paul Daoudi , Mathias Formoso , Othman Gaizi , Achraf Azize , Evrard Garcelon

Real-world sequential decision making problems commonly involve partial observability, which requires the agent to maintain a memory of history in order to infer the latent states, plan and make good decisions. Coping with partial…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-09 Yonathan Efroni , Chi Jin , Akshay Krishnamurthy , Sobhan Miryoosefi

In this study, we derive Probably Approximately Correct (PAC) bounds on the asymptotic sample-complexity for RL within the infinite-horizon Markov Decision Process (MDP) setting that are sharper than those in existing literature. The…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-17 Mohit Prashant , Arvind Easwaran

The Robust Markov Decision Process (RMDP) framework focuses on designing control policies that are robust against the parameter uncertainties due to the mismatches between the simulator model and real-world settings. An RMDP problem is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-17 Kishan Panaganti , Dileep Kalathil

We study the exploration problem with approximate linear action-value functions in episodic reinforcement learning under the notion of low inherent Bellman error, a condition normally employed to show convergence of approximate value…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-30 Andrea Zanette , Alessandro Lazaric , Mykel Kochenderfer , Emma Brunskill

Reinforcement learning (RL) for reachability specifications is fundamental in sequential decision-making, yet theoretical guarantees remain less explored. A recent work achieves asymptotic convergence to optimal policies. However, this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Amogh Palasamudram , Jakub Svoboda , Suguman Bansal , Krishnendu Chatterjee

Exploration in multi-task reinforcement learning is critical in training agents to deduce the underlying MDP. Many of the existing exploration frameworks such as $E^3$, $R_{max}$, Thompson sampling assume a single stationary MDP and are not…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2016-12-04 Sai Praveen Bangaru , JS Suhas , Balaraman Ravindran

Recent research in multi-robot exploration and mapping has focused on sampling environmental fields, which are typically modeled using the Gaussian process (GP). Existing information-theoretic exploration strategies for learning GP-based…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2011-02-01 Kian Hsiang Low , John M. Dolan , Pradeep Khosla

Partial observability is a common challenge in many reinforcement learning applications, which requires an agent to maintain memory, infer latent states, and integrate this past information into exploration. This challenge leads to a number…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-27 Chi Jin , Sham M. Kakade , Akshay Krishnamurthy , Qinghua Liu

The process of discovery requires active exploration -- the act of collecting new and informative data. However, efficient autonomous exploration remains a major unsolved problem. The dominant paradigm addresses this challenge by using…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Zakaria Mhammedi , James Cohan

Many practical decision-making problems involve tasks whose success depends on the entire system history, rather than on achieving a state with desired properties. Markovian Reinforcement Learning (RL) approaches are not suitable for such…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-17 Alessandro Trapasso , Luca Iocchi , Fabio Patrizi

A major challenge in reinforcement learning is to develop practical, sample-efficient algorithms for exploration in high-dimensional domains where generalization and function approximation is required. Low-Rank Markov Decision Processes --…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-01 Zakaria Mhammedi , Adam Block , Dylan J. Foster , Alexander Rakhlin

One of the main challenges in reinforcement learning is solving tasks with sparse reward. We show that the difficulty of discovering a distant rewarding state in an MDP is bounded by the expected cover time of a random walk over the graph…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2019-03-19 Yuu Jinnai , Jee Won Park , David Abel , George Konidaris

Achieving efficient and scalable exploration in complex domains poses a major challenge in reinforcement learning. While Bayesian and PAC-MDP approaches to the exploration problem offer strong formal guarantees, they are often impractical…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2015-11-23 Bradly C. Stadie , Sergey Levine , Pieter Abbeel