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Related papers: Towards Causal Model-Based Policy Optimization

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Maximizing a target variable as an operational objective within a structural causal model is a fundamental problem. Causal Bayesian Optimization (CBO) approaches typically achieve this either by performing interventions that modify the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Shaogang Ren , Zihao Wang , Yuzhou Chen , Xiaoning Qian

Model-based offline Reinforcement Learning (RL) allows agents to fully utilise pre-collected datasets without requiring additional or unethical explorations. However, applying model-based offline RL to online systems presents challenges,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-04 Xuehui Yu , Yi Guan , Rujia Shen , Xin Li , Chen Tang , Jingchi Jiang

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)…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2021-09-29 Krishna C. Kalagarla , Rahul Jain , Pierluigi Nuzzo

Deploying reinforcement learning policies in the real world requires adapting to time-varying environments. We study this problem in the contextual Markov Decision Process (cMDP) framework, where a family of environments is indexed by a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-04 Param Budhraja , Aditya Gangrade , Alex Olshevsky , Venkatesh Saligrama

Recently, online Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has become a key paradigm for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, existing methods typically treat all training samples…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Shijie Zhang , Guohao Sun , Kevin Zhang , Xiang Guo , Rujun Guo

Planning plays an important role in the broad class of decision theory. Planning has drawn much attention in recent work in the robotics and sequential decision making areas. Recently, Reinforcement Learning (RL), as an agent-environment…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2016-08-18 Kamyar Azizzadenesheli , Alessandro Lazaric , Animashree Anandkumar

Robots operating in real-world environments must reason about possible outcomes of stochastic actions and make decisions based on partial observations of the true world state. A major challenge for making accurate and robust action…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-07-28 Ricardo Cannizzaro , Lars Kunze

We study continuous action reinforcement learning problems in which it is crucial that the agent interacts with the environment only through safe policies, i.e.,~policies that do not take the agent to undesirable situations. We formulate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-02-13 Yinlam Chow , Ofir Nachum , Aleksandra Faust , Edgar Duenez-Guzman , Mohammad Ghavamzadeh

This paper presents a new optimization approach to causal estimation. Given data that contains covariates and an outcome, which covariates are causes of the outcome, and what is the strength of the causality? In classical machine learning…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-10-22 Mingzhang Yin , Yixin Wang , David M. Blei

Controllers trained with Reinforcement Learning tend to be very specialized and thus generalize poorly when their testing environment differs from their training one. We propose a Model-Based approach to increase generalization where both…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-15 Valentin Charvet , Sebastian Stein , Roderick Murray-Smith

Recently, Masked Diffusion Models (MDMs) have shown promising potential across vision, language, and cross-modal generation. However, a notable discrepancy exists between their training and inference procedures. In particular, MDM inference…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-30 Renping Zhou , Zanlin Ni , Tianyi Chen , Zeyu Liu , Yang Yue , Yulin Wang , Yuxuan Wang , Jingshu Liu , Gao Huang

Reinforcement Learning (RL) for constrained MDPs (CMDPs) is an increasingly important problem for various applications. Often, the average criterion is more suitable than the discounted criterion. Yet, RL for average-CMDPs (ACMDPs) remains…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-27 Akhil Agnihotri , Rahul Jain , Haipeng Luo

We consider synthesis of control policies that maximize the probability of satisfying given temporal logic specifications in unknown, stochastic environments. We model the interaction between the system and its environment as a Markov…

Systems and Control · Computer Science 2014-05-01 Jie Fu , Ufuk Topcu

In this paper we consider the basic version of Reinforcement Learning (RL) that involves computing optimal data driven (adaptive) policies for Markovian decision process with unknown transition probabilities. We provide a brief survey of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-09-16 Wesley Cowan , Michael N. Katehakis , Daniel Pirutinsky

Reinforcement learning (RL) solves sequential decision-making problems via a trial-and-error process interacting with the environment. While RL achieves outstanding success in playing complex video games that allow huge trial-and-error,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-22 Fan-Ming Luo , Tian Xu , Hang Lai , Xiong-Hui Chen , Weinan Zhang , Yang Yu

Addressing uncertainty is critical for autonomous systems to robustly adapt to the real world. We formulate the problem of model uncertainty as a continuous Bayes-Adaptive Markov Decision Process (BAMDP), where an agent maintains a…

During initial iterations of training in most Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms, agents perform a significant number of random exploratory steps. In the real world, this can limit the practicality of these algorithms as it can lead to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-17 Ashish Kumar Jayant , Shalabh Bhatnagar

We propose the Constraint-Generation Policy Optimization (CGPO) framework to optimize policy parameters within compact and interpretable policy classes for mixed discrete-continuous Markov Decision Processes (DC-MDP). CGPO can not only…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-03-18 Michael Gimelfarb , Ayal Taitler , Scott Sanner

Model-based offline reinforcement learning (RL) has made remarkable progress, offering a promising avenue for improving generalization with synthetic model rollouts. Existing works primarily focus on incorporating pessimism for policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-12 Yuanzhao Zhai , Yiying Li , Zijian Gao , Xudong Gong , Kele Xu , Dawei Feng , Ding Bo , Huaimin Wang

Context-based offline meta-reinforcement learning (OMRL) methods have achieved appealing success by leveraging pre-collected offline datasets to develop task representations that guide policy learning. However, current context-based OMRL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-04 Zhengzhe Zhang , Wenjia Meng , Haoliang Sun , Gang Pan