Related papers: Generalization in Monitored Markov Decision Proces…
We consider the problem of learning by demonstration from agents acting in unknown stochastic Markov environments or games. Our aim is to estimate agent preferences in order to construct improved policies for the same task that the agents…
We present the first finite time global convergence analysis of policy gradient in the context of infinite horizon average reward Markov decision processes (MDPs). Specifically, we focus on ergodic tabular MDPs with finite state and action…
Robust Markov decision processes (MDPs) address the challenge of model uncertainty by optimizing the worst-case performance over an uncertainty set of MDPs. In this paper, we focus on the robust average-reward MDPs under the model-free…
A standard assumption in Reinforcement Learning is that the agent observes every visited state-action pair in the associated Markov Decision Process (MDP), along with the per-step rewards. Strong theoretical results are known in this…
Sequential decision making, commonly formalized as Markov Decision Process (MDP) optimization, is a important challenge in artificial intelligence. Two key approaches to this problem are reinforcement learning (RL) and planning. This paper…
Reinforcement fine-tuning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for equipping large vision-language models (LVLMs) with agentic capabilities such as tool use and multi-step reasoning. Despite striking empirical…
Contextual Markov decision processes (CMDPs) describe a class of reinforcement learning problems in which the transition kernels and reward functions can change over time with different MDPs indexed by a context variable. While CMDPs serve…
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…
Many physical systems have underlying safety considerations that require that the policy employed ensures the satisfaction of a set of constraints. The analytical formulation usually takes the form of a Constrained Markov Decision Process…
We propose a reinforcement learning (RL) framework for multi-objective decision-making, where the agent seeks to optimize a vector of rewards rather than a single scalar value. The objective is to ensure that the time-averaged reward vector…
Exploration in reinforcement learning (RL) remains an open challenge. RL algorithms rely on observing rewards to train the agent, and if informative rewards are sparse the agent learns slowly or may not learn at all. To improve exploration…
Imitation learning seeks to circumvent the difficulty in designing proper reward functions for training agents by utilizing expert behavior. With environments modeled as Markov Decision Processes (MDP), most of the existing imitation…
Exploration is widely regarded as one of the most challenging aspects of reinforcement learning (RL), with many naive approaches succumbing to exponential sample complexity. To isolate the challenges of exploration, we propose a new…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a learning paradigm concerned with learning to control a system so as to maximize an objective over the long term. This approach to learning has received immense interest in recent times and success manifests…
While Reinforcement Learning (RL) aims to train an agent from a reward function in a given environment, Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) seeks to recover the reward function from observing an expert's behavior. It is well known that, in…
We study learning contextual MDPs using a function approximation for both the rewards and the dynamics. We consider both the case that the dynamics dependent or independent of the context. For both models we derive polynomial sample and…
Video generation models produce visually coherent content but struggle with tasks requiring spatial reasoning and multi-step planning. Reinforcement learning (RL) offers a path to improve generalization, but its effectiveness in video…
We consider the problem of constrained Markov Decision Process (CMDP) where an agent interacts with a unichain Markov Decision Process. At every interaction, the agent obtains a reward. Further, there are $K$ cost functions. The agent aims…
This paper studies generalized inverse reinforcement learning (GIRL) in Markov decision processes (MDPs), that is, the problem of learning the basic components of an MDP given observed behavior (policy) that might not be optimal. These…
We introduce the forward-backward (FB) representation of the dynamics of a reward-free Markov decision process. It provides explicit near-optimal policies for any reward specified a posteriori. During an unsupervised phase, we use…