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Related papers: Monitored Markov Decision Processes

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Reinforcement learning (RL), a common tool in decision making, learns control policies from various experiences based on the associated cumulative return/rewards without treating them differently. Humans, on the contrary, often learn to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-25 Mingkang Wu , Devin White , Vernon Lawhern , Nicholas R. Waytowich , Yongcan Cao

Efficient exploration has presented a long-standing challenge in reinforcement learning, especially when rewards are sparse. A developmental system can overcome this difficulty by learning from both demonstrations and self-exploration.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-19 Siqing Hou , Dongqi Han , Jun Tani

Although research has produced promising results demonstrating the utility of active inference (AIF) in Markov decision processes (MDPs), there is relatively less work that builds AIF models in the context of environments and problems that…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-09-24 Viet Dung Nguyen , Zhizhuo Yang , Christopher L. Buckley , Alexander Ororbia

In applications of offline reinforcement learning to observational data, such as in healthcare or education, a general concern is that observed actions might be affected by unobserved factors, inducing confounding and biasing estimates…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-24 Andrew Bennett , Nathan Kallus

Recent research has turned to Reinforcement Learning (RL) to solve challenging decision problems, as an alternative to hand-tuned heuristics. RL can learn good policies without the need for modeling the environment's dynamics. Despite this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-30 Pouya Hamadanian , Malte Schwarzkopf , Siddartha Sen , Mohammad Alizadeh

In reinforcement learning, we often define goals by specifying rewards within desirable states. One problem with this approach is that we typically need to redefine the rewards each time the goal changes, which often requires some…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-07-26 Ashley D. Edwards , Srijan Sood , Charles L. Isbell

This paper presents a novel approach to Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) that combines cooperative task decomposition with the learning of reward machines (RMs) encoding the structure of the sub-tasks. The proposed method helps…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-02-17 Leo Ardon , Daniel Furelos-Blanco , Alessandra Russo

Model-based Deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) assumes the availability of a model of an environment's underlying transition dynamics. This model can be used to predict future effects of an agent's possible actions. When no such model is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-15 Andreas Sedlmeier , Michael Kölle , Robert Müller , Leo Baudrexel , Claudia Linnhoff-Popien

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has demonstrated strong potential for industrial process control, yet policies trained in simulation often suffer from a significant sim-to-real gap when deployed on physical hardware. This work systematically…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-13 Tatjana Krau , Jorge Mandlmaier , Tobias Damm , Frieder Heieck

We consider the recently proposed reinforcement learning (RL) framework of Contextual Markov Decision Processes (CMDP), where the agent interacts with a (potentially adversarial) sequence of episodic tabular MDPs. In addition, a context…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-19 Aditya Modi , Ambuj Tewari

While reinforcement learning (RL) has the potential to enable robots to autonomously acquire a wide range of skills, in practice, RL usually requires manual, per-task engineering of reward functions, especially in real world settings where…

Robotics · Computer Science 2019-02-15 Tianhe Yu , Gleb Shevchuk , Dorsa Sadigh , Chelsea Finn

Deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) is successful in solving many complex Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) problems. However, agents often face unanticipated environmental changes after deployment in the real world. These changes are often…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-29 Beining Han , Chongyi Zheng , Harris Chan , Keiran Paster , Michael R. Zhang , Jimmy Ba

Unsupervised reinforcement learning (RL) studies how to leverage environment statistics to learn useful behaviors without the cost of reward engineering. However, a central challenge in unsupervised RL is to extract behaviors that…

We consider episodic reinforcement learning in reward-mixing Markov decision processes (RMMDPs): at the beginning of every episode nature randomly picks a latent reward model among $M$ candidates and an agent interacts with the MDP…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-07 Jeongyeol Kwon , Yonathan Efroni , Constantine Caramanis , Shie Mannor

Reinforcement learning (RL) makes it possible to train agents capable of achieving sophisticated goals in complex and uncertain environments. A key difficulty in reinforcement learning is specifying a reward function for the agent to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-09-24 Bradly C. Stadie , Pieter Abbeel , Ilya Sutskever

Randomized experiments (a.k.a. A/B tests) are a powerful tool for estimating treatment effects, to inform decisions making in business, healthcare and other applications. In many problems, the treatment has a lasting effect that evolves…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-17 Ziyang Tang , Yiheng Duan , Stephanie Zhang , Lihong Li

Observational learning is a type of learning that occurs as a function of observing, retaining and possibly replicating or imitating the behaviour of another agent. It is a core mechanism appearing in various instances of social learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-06-22 Diana Borsa , Bilal Piot , Rémi Munos , Olivier Pietquin

The interactive partially observable Markov decision process (I-POMDP) is a recently developed framework which extends the POMDP to the multi-agent setting by including agent models in the state space. This paper argues for formulating the…

Robotics · Computer Science 2012-04-03 Mark P. Woodward , Robert J. Wood

Reward function design and exploration time are arguably the biggest obstacles to the deployment of reinforcement learning (RL) agents in the real world. In many real-world tasks, designing a reward function takes considerable hand…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2017-06-14 Pierre Sermanet , Kelvin Xu , Sergey Levine

Safety is still one of the major research challenges in reinforcement learning (RL). In this paper, we address the problem of how to avoid safety violations of RL agents during exploration in probabilistic and partially unknown…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-06 Martin Tappler , Stefan Pranger , Bettina Könighofer , Edi Muškardin , Roderick Bloem , Kim Larsen