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A common strategy in modern learning systems is to learn a representation that is useful for many tasks, a.k.a. representation learning. We study this strategy in the imitation learning setting for Markov decision processes (MDPs) where…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-26 Sanjeev Arora , Simon S. Du , Sham Kakade , Yuping Luo , Nikunj Saunshi

Model-based reinforcement learning (RL) is appealing because (i) it enables planning and thus more strategic exploration, and (ii) by decoupling dynamics from rewards, it enables fast transfer to new reward functions. However, learning an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-14 Evan Zheran Liu , Ramtin Keramati , Sudarshan Seshadri , Kelvin Guu , Panupong Pasupat , Emma Brunskill , Percy Liang

Learning good representations of historical contexts is one of the core challenges of reinforcement learning (RL) in partially observable environments. While self-predictive auxiliary tasks have been shown to improve performance in fully…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-11 Jeongyeol Kwon , Liu Yang , Robert Nowak , Josiah Hanna

Representation learning methods are an important tool for addressing the challenges posed by complex observations spaces in sequential decision making problems. Recently, many methods have used a wide variety of types of approaches for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-24 Ayoub Echchahed , Pablo Samuel Castro

Many methods for Model-based Reinforcement learning (MBRL) in Markov decision processes (MDPs) provide guarantees for both the accuracy of the model they can deliver and the learning efficiency. At the same time, state abstraction…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-16 Rolf A. N. Starre , Marco Loog , Elena Congeduti , Frans A. Oliehoek

Robots could learn their own state and world representation from perception and experience without supervision. This desirable goal is the main focus of our field of interest, state representation learning (SRL). Indeed, a compact…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-28 Astrid Merckling , Alexandre Coninx , Loic Cressot , Stéphane Doncieux , Nicolas Perrin-Gilbert

We consider a new form of reinforcement learning (RL) that is based on opportunities to directly learn the optimal control policy and a general Markov decision process (MDP) framework devised to support these opportunities. Derivations of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-02 Yingdong Lu , Mark S. Squillante , Chai Wah Wu

Given a Markov decision process (MDP), we seek to learn representations for a range of policies to facilitate behavior steering at test time. As policies of an MDP are uniquely determined by their occupancy measures, we propose modeling…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Beiming Li , Sergio Rozada , Alejandro Ribeiro

We consider online reinforcement learning (RL) in episodic Markov decision processes (MDPs) under the linear $q^\pi$-realizability assumption, where it is assumed that the action-values of all policies can be expressed as linear functions…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-21 Gellért Weisz , András György , Csaba Szepesvári

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a fundamental framework for sequential decision-making, in which an agent learns an optimal policy through interactions with an unknown environment. In settings with function approximation, many existing RL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Ruiquan Huang , Donghao Li , Yingbin Liang , Jing Yang

Strategies for partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDP) typically require memory. One way to represent this memory is via automata. We present a method to learn an automaton representation of a strategy using a modification of…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-10-03 Alexander Bork , Debraj Chakraborty , Kush Grover , Jan Kretinsky , Stefanie Mohr

This review addresses the problem of learning abstract representations of the measurement data in the context of Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL). While the data are often ambiguous, high-dimensional, and complex to interpret, many…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-31 Nicolò Botteghi , Mannes Poel , Christoph Brune

Many control tasks exhibit similar dynamics that can be modeled as having common latent structure. Hidden-Parameter Markov Decision Processes (HiP-MDPs) explicitly model this structure to improve sample efficiency in multi-task settings.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-15 Amy Zhang , Shagun Sodhani , Khimya Khetarpal , Joelle Pineau

We consider a Reinforcement Learning setup where an agent interacts with an environment in observation-reward-action cycles without any (esp.\ MDP) assumptions on the environment. State aggregation and more generally feature reinforcement…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2014-07-15 Marcus Hutter

The importance of hierarchically structured representations for tractable planning has long been acknowledged. However, the questions of how people discover such abstractions and how to define a set of optimal abstractions remain open. This…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-07-20 Sophia Sanborn , David D. Bourgin , Michael Chang , Thomas L. Griffiths

The continuous nature of belief states in POMDPs presents significant computational challenges in learning the optimal policy. In this paper, we consider an approach that solves a Partially Observable Reinforcement Learning (PORL) problem…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-15 Ameya Anjarlekar , Rasoul Etesami , R Srikant

Humans achieve efficient learning by relying on prior knowledge about the structure of naturally occurring tasks. There is considerable interest in designing reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms with similar properties. This includes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-23 Jan Humplik , Alexandre Galashov , Leonard Hasenclever , Pedro A. Ortega , Yee Whye Teh , Nicolas Heess

Many real-world reinforcement learning (RL) problems necessitate learning complex, temporally extended behavior that may only receive reward signal when the behavior is completed. If the reward-worthy behavior is known, it can be specified…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-10 Phillip J. K. Christoffersen , Andrew C. Li , Rodrigo Toro Icarte , Sheila A. McIlraith

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…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-11-17 Rene Carmona , Mathieu Lauriere

Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs) can model complex sequential decision-making problems under stochastic and uncertain environments. A main reason hindering their broad adoption in real-world applications is the lack…