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We study the setting of \emph{performative reinforcement learning} where the deployed policy affects both the reward, and the transition of the underlying Markov decision process. Prior work~\parencite{MTR23} has addressed this problem…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-18 Debmalya Mandal , Goran Radanovic

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-15 Ernst Moritz Hahn , Mateo Perez , Sven Schewe , Fabio Somenzi , Ashutosh Trivedi , Dominik Wojtczak

No real-world reward function is perfect. Sensory errors and software bugs may result in RL agents observing higher (or lower) rewards than they should. For example, a reinforcement learning agent may prefer states where a sensory error…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-08-22 Tom Everitt , Victoria Krakovna , Laurent Orseau , Marcus Hutter , Shane Legg

The most data-efficient algorithms for reinforcement learning in robotics are model-based policy search algorithms, which alternate between learning a dynamical model of the robot and optimizing a policy to maximize the expected return…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-05 Rituraj Kaushik , Konstantinos Chatzilygeroudis , Jean-Baptiste Mouret

Mixed observable Markov decision processes (MOMDPs) are a modeling framework for autonomous systems described by both fully and partially observable states. In this work, we study the problem of synthesizing a control policy for MOMDPs that…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2021-03-03 Ugo Rosolia , Mohamadreza Ahmadi , Richard M. Murray , Aaron D. Ames

To achieve sample efficiency in reinforcement learning (RL), it necessitates efficiently exploring the underlying environment. Under the offline setting, addressing the exploration challenge lies in collecting an offline dataset with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-15 Shuang Qiu , Jieping Ye , Zhaoran Wang , Zhuoran Yang

We study the reward-free reinforcement learning framework, which is particularly suitable for batch reinforcement learning and scenarios where one needs policies for multiple reward functions. This framework has two phases. In the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-26 Zihan Zhang , Simon S. Du , Xiangyang Ji

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

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-03 Tien Mai , Patrick Jaillet

We develop several provably efficient model-free reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms for infinite-horizon average-reward Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). We consider both online setting and the setting with access to a simulator. In the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-29 Zihan Zhang , Qiaomin Xie

We consider Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) with deterministic transitions and study the problem of regret minimization, which is central to the analysis and design of optimal learning algorithms. We present logarithmic problem-specific…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-29 Damianos Tranos , Alexandre Proutiere

Reinforcement learning (RL) has exceeded human performance in many synthetic settings such as video games and Go. However, real-world deployment of end-to-end RL models is less common, as RL models can be very sensitive to slight…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-29 Jing Dong , Jingwei Li , Baoxiang Wang , Jingzhao Zhang

Multi-objective optimization models that encode ordered sequential constraints provide a solution to model various challenging problems including encoding preferences, modeling a curriculum, and enforcing measures of safety. A recently…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-09-16 Kyle Hollins Wray , Stas Tiomkin , Mykel J. Kochenderfer , Pieter Abbeel

We study reinforcement learning from human feedback in general Markov decision processes, where agents learn from trajectory-level preference comparisons. A central challenge in this setting is to design algorithms that select informative…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-05 Andreas Schlaginhaufen , Reda Ouhamma , Maryam Kamgarpour

The ability to compute reward-optimal policies for given and known finite Markov decision processes (MDPs) underpins a variety of applications across planning, controller synthesis, and verification. However, we often want policies (1) to…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2025-11-18 Linus Heck , Filip Macák , Milan Češka , Sebastian Junges

The low rank MDP has emerged as an important model for studying representation learning and exploration in reinforcement learning. With a known representation, several model-free exploration strategies exist. In contrast, all algorithms for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-23 Aditya Modi , Jinglin Chen , Akshay Krishnamurthy , Nan Jiang , Alekh Agarwal

This paper proposes a formal approach to online learning and planning for agents operating in a priori unknown, time-varying environments. The proposed method computes the maximally likely model of the environment, given the observations…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-09 Melkior Ornik , Ufuk Topcu

This paper aims to establish an entropy-regularized value-based reinforcement learning method that can ensure the monotonic improvement of policies at each policy update. Unlike previously proposed lower-bounds on policy improvement in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-26 Lingwei Zhu , Takamitsu Matsubara

Optimal control in non-stationary Markov decision processes (MDP) is a challenging problem. The aim in such a control problem is to maximize the long-term discounted reward when the transition dynamics or the reward function can change over…

Applications · Statistics 2017-03-03 Taposh Banerjee , Miao Liu , Jonathan P. How

This work focuses on off-policy evaluation (OPE) with function approximation in infinite-horizon undiscounted Markov decision processes (MDPs). For MDPs that are ergodic and linear (i.e. where rewards and dynamics are linear in some known…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-24 Nevena Lazic , Dong Yin , Mehrdad Farajtabar , Nir Levine , Dilan Gorur , Chris Harris , Dale Schuurmans