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Learning from demonstration has proven effective in robotics for acquiring natural behaviors, such as stylistic motions and lifelike agility, particularly when explicitly defining style-oriented reward functions is challenging. Synthesizing…
A common setting of reinforcement learning (RL) is a Markov decision process (MDP) in which the environment is a stochastic discrete-time dynamical system. Whereas MDPs are suitable in such applications as video-games or puzzles, physical…
Many applications -- including power systems, robotics, and economics -- involve a dynamical system interacting with a stochastic and hard-to-model environment. We adopt a reinforcement learning approach to control such systems.…
Tracking controllers enable robotic systems to accurately follow planned reference trajectories. In particular, reinforcement learning (RL) has shown promise in the synthesis of controllers for systems with complex dynamics and modest…
Stochastic and soft optimal policies resulting from entropy-regularized Markov decision processes (ER-MDP) are desirable for exploration and imitation learning applications. Motivated by the fact that such policies are sensitive with…
An efficient representation of observed data has many benefits in various domains of engineering and science. Representing static data sets, such as images, is a living branch in machine learning and eases downstream tasks, such as…
We study the problem of online learning in a class of Markov decision processes known as linearly solvable MDPs. In the stationary version of this problem, a learner interacts with its environment by directly controlling the state…
We suggest a mechanism based on spike time dependent plasticity (STDP) of synapses to store, retrieve and predict temporal sequences. The mechanism is demonstrated in a model system of simplified integrate-and-fire type neurons densely…
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…
General purpose intelligent learning agents cycle through (complex,non-MDP) sequences of observations, actions, and rewards. On the other hand, reinforcement learning is well-developed for small finite state Markov Decision Processes…
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,…
The current reinforcement learning framework focuses exclusively on performance, often at the expense of efficiency. In contrast, biological control achieves remarkable performance while also optimizing computational energy expenditure and…
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…
Suppose an agent is in a (possibly unknown) Markov Decision Process in the absence of a reward signal, what might we hope that an agent can efficiently learn to do? This work studies a broad class of objectives that are defined solely as…
We present a model-free reinforcement learning algorithm to find an optimal policy for a finite-horizon Markov decision process while guaranteeing a desired lower bound on the probability of satisfying a signal temporal logic (STL)…
A Markov Decision Process (MDP) is a popular model for reinforcement learning. However, its commonly used assumption of stationary dynamics and rewards is too stringent and fails to hold in adversarial, nonstationary, or multi-agent…
We study infinite horizon Markov decision processes (MDPs) with "fast-slow" structure, where some state variables evolve rapidly ("fast states") while others change more gradually ("slow states"). This structure commonly arises in practice…
We study reinforcement learning for the optimal control of Branching Markov Decision Processes (BMDPs), a natural extension of (multitype) Branching Markov Chains (BMCs). The state of a (discrete-time) BMCs is a collection of entities of…
We present a method for solving implicit (factored) Markov decision processes (MDPs) with very large state spaces. We introduce a property of state space partitions which we call epsilon-homogeneity. Intuitively, an epsilon-homogeneous…
We consider problems in sequential decision making with natural multi-level structure, where sub-tasks are assembled together to accomplish complex goals. Systematically inferring and leveraging hierarchical structure has remained a…