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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

Transfer reinforcement learning aims to improve the sample efficiency of solving unseen new tasks by leveraging experiences obtained from previous tasks. We consider the setting where all tasks (MDPs) share the same environment dynamic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-08 Kaige Yang

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

We study pre-training representations for decision-making using video data, which is abundantly available for tasks such as game agents and software testing. Even though significant empirical advances have been made on this problem, a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-21 Dipendra Misra , Akanksha Saran , Tengyang Xie , Alex Lamb , John Langford

Non-stationary environments are challenging for reinforcement learning algorithms. If the state transition and/or reward functions change based on latent factors, the agent is effectively tasked with optimizing a behavior that maximizes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-21 Lucas N. Alegre , Ana L. C. Bazzan , Bruno C. da Silva

The curse of dimensionality is a widely known issue in reinforcement learning (RL). In the tabular setting where the state space $\mathcal{S}$ and the action space $\mathcal{A}$ are both finite, to obtain a nearly optimal policy with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-28 Bingyan Wang , Yuling Yan , Jianqing Fan

Understanding emerging behaviors of reinforcement learning (RL) agents may be difficult since such agents are often trained in complex environments using highly complex decision making procedures. This has given rise to a variety of…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-12-02 Mira Finkelstein , Lucy Liu , Nitsan Levy Schlot , Yoav Kolumbus , David C. Parkes , Jeffrey S. Rosenshein , Sarah Keren

This paper presents a state representation framework for Markov decision processes (MDPs) that can be learned solely from state trajectories, requiring neither reward signals nor the actions executed by the agent. We propose learning the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-25 Lorenzo Steccanella , Joshua B. Evans , Özgür Şimşek , Anders Jonsson

Consider learning a policy purely on the basis of demonstrated behavior -- that is, with no access to reinforcement signals, no knowledge of transition dynamics, and no further interaction with the environment. This *strictly batch…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-01-15 Daniel Jarrett , Ioana Bica , Mihaela van der Schaar

General-purpose, intelligent, learning agents cycle through sequences of observations, actions, and rewards that are complex, uncertain, unknown, and non-Markovian. On the other hand, reinforcement learning is well-developed for small…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2009-12-30 Marcus Hutter

How to learn an effective reinforcement learning-based model for control tasks from high-level visual observations is a practical and challenging problem. A key to solving this problem is to learn low-dimensional state representations from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-27 Jianda Chen , Sinno Jialin Pan

Many reinforcement learning (RL) tasks provide the agent with high-dimensional observations that can be simplified into low-dimensional continuous states. To formalize this process, we introduce the concept of a DeepMDP, a parameterized…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-07 Carles Gelada , Saurabh Kumar , Jacob Buckman , Ofir Nachum , Marc G. Bellemare

In real-world reinforcement learning (RL) scenarios, agents often encounter partial observability, where incomplete or noisy information obscures the true state of the environment. Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs) are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-19 Ashok Arora , Neetesh Kumar

Exogenous state variables and rewards can slow reinforcement learning by injecting uncontrolled variation into the reward signal. This paper formalizes exogenous state variables and rewards and shows that if the reward function decomposes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-15 George Trimponias , Thomas G. Dietterich

Model-based learning algorithms have been shown to use experience efficiently when learning to solve Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) with finite state and action spaces. However, their high computational cost due to repeatedly solving an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-07-02 Alexander L. Strehl , Lihong Li , Michael L. Littman

Reinforcement learning (RL) agents are commonly trained and evaluated in the same environment. In contrast, humans often train in a specialized environment before being evaluated, such as studying a book before taking an exam. The potential…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-19 Jarek Liesen , Chris Lu , Andrei Lupu , Jakob N. Foerster , Henning Sprekeler , Robert T. Lange

Real-world decision-making tasks are usually partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs), where the state is not fully observable. Recent progress has demonstrated that recurrent reinforcement learning (RL), which consists of a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-27 Fan-Ming Luo , Zuolin Tu , Zefang Huang , Yang Yu

The key assumption underlying linear Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) is that the learner has access to a known feature map $\phi(x, a)$ that maps state-action pairs to $d$-dimensional vectors, and that the rewards and transitions are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-20 Noah Golowich , Ankur Moitra , Dhruv Rohatgi

Robust Markov decision processes (r-MDPs) extend MDPs by explicitly modelling epistemic uncertainty about transition dynamics. Learning r-MDPs from interactions with an unknown environment enables the synthesis of robust policies with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-21 Yannik Schnitzer , Alessandro Abate , David Parker

We study the design of sample-efficient algorithms for reinforcement learning in the presence of rich, high-dimensional observations, formalized via the Block MDP problem. Existing algorithms suffer from either 1) computational…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-13 Zakaria Mhammedi , Dylan J. Foster , Alexander Rakhlin