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We study reward-free reinforcement learning (RL) with linear function approximation, where the agent works in two phases: (1) in the exploration phase, the agent interacts with the environment but cannot access the reward; and (2) in the…
Designing sample-efficient and computationally feasible reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms is particularly challenging in environments with large or infinite state and action spaces. In this paper, we advance this effort by presenting…
Combining reinforcement learning (RL) and molecular dynamics (MD) simulations, we propose a machine-learning approach (RL$^\ddag$) to automatically unravel chemical reaction mechanisms. In RL$^\ddag$, locating the transition state of a…
Finding optimal policies which maximize long term rewards of Markov Decision Processes requires the use of dynamic programming and backward induction to solve the Bellman optimality equation. However, many real-world problems require…
Average-reward Markov decision processes (MDPs) provide a foundational framework for sequential decision-making under uncertainty. However, average-reward MDPs have remained largely unexplored in reinforcement learning (RL) settings, with…
This paper concerns the central issues of model robustness and sample efficiency in offline reinforcement learning (RL), which aims to learn to perform decision making from history data without active exploration. Due to uncertainties and…
Offline reinforcement learning enables agents to leverage large pre-collected datasets of environment transitions to learn control policies, circumventing the need for potentially expensive or unsafe online data collection. Significant…
In Markov Decision Processes (MDPs), the reward obtained in a state depends on the properties of the last state and action. This state dependency makes it difficult to reward more interesting long-term behaviors, such as always closing a…
We consider the problem of learning in a non-stationary reinforcement learning (RL) environment, where the setting can be fully described by a piecewise stationary discrete-time Markov decision process (MDP). We introduce a variant of the…
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…
The sim-to-real gap, which represents the disparity between training and testing environments, poses a significant challenge in reinforcement learning (RL). A promising approach to addressing this challenge is distributionally robust RL,…
Measuring states in reinforcement learning (RL) can be costly in real-world settings and may negatively influence future outcomes. We introduce the Actively Observable Markov Decision Process (AOMDP), where an agent not only selects control…
Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms struggle with learning optimal policies for tasks where reward feedback is sparse and depends on a complex sequence of events in the environment. Probabilistic reward machines (PRMs) are finite-state…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a widely employed machine learning architecture that has been applied to a variety of control problems. However, applications in safety-critical domains require a systematic and formal approach to specifying…
The standard Markov Decision Process (MDP) formulation hinges on the assumption that an action is executed immediately after it was chosen. However, assuming it is often unrealistic and can lead to catastrophic failures in applications such…
In this paper, we focus on the problem of robustifying reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms with respect to model uncertainties. Indeed, in the framework of model-based RL, we propose to merge the theory of constrained Markov decision…
For applications in healthcare, physics, energy, robotics, and many other fields, designing maximally informative experiments is valuable, particularly when experiments are expensive, time-consuming, or pose safety hazards. While existing…
Recently, safe reinforcement learning (RL) with the actor-critic structure for continuous control tasks has received increasing attention. It is still challenging to learn a near-optimal control policy with safety and convergence…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods are typically applied directly in environments to learn policies. In some complex environments with continuous state-action spaces, sparse rewards, and/or long temporal horizons, learning a good policy in…
A fundamental assumption of reinforcement learning in Markov decision processes (MDPs) is that the relevant decision process is, in fact, Markov. However, when MDPs have rich observations, agents typically learn by way of an abstract state…