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When Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents are deployed in practice, they might impact their environment and change its dynamics. We propose a new framework to model this phenomenon, where the current environment depends on the deployed policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-03 Ben Rank , Stelios Triantafyllou , Debmalya Mandal , Goran Radanovic

Despite its popularity in the reinforcement learning community, a provably convergent policy gradient method for continuous space-time control problems with nonlinear state dynamics has been elusive. This paper proposes proximal gradient…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-12-27 Christoph Reisinger , Wolfgang Stockinger , Yufei Zhang

The success of Reinforcement Learning (RL) heavily relies on the ability to learn robust representations from the observations of the environment. In most cases, the representations learned purely by the reinforcement learning loss can…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-12 Somjit Nath , Rushiv Arora , Samira Ebrahimi Kahou

We introduce Dynamic Contextual Markov Decision Processes (DCMDPs), a novel reinforcement learning framework for history-dependent environments that generalizes the contextual MDP framework to handle non-Markov environments, where contexts…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-19 Guy Tennenholtz , Nadav Merlis , Lior Shani , Martin Mladenov , Craig Boutilier

The performance of reinforcement learning depends upon designing an appropriate action space, where the effect of each action is measurable, yet, granular enough to permit flexible behavior. So far, this process involved non-trivial user…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-08 Edoardo Cetin , Oya Celiktutan

Self-driving vehicles must be able to act intelligently in diverse and difficult environments, marked by high-dimensional state spaces, a myriad of optimization objectives and complex behaviors. Traditionally, classical optimization and…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-11-11 Josiah Coad , Zhiqian Qiao , John M. Dolan

We consider a context-dependent Reinforcement Learning (RL) setting, which is characterized by: a) an unknown finite number of not directly observable contexts; b) abrupt (discontinuous) context changes occurring during an episode; and c)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-15 Hang Ren , Aivar Sootla , Taher Jafferjee , Junxiao Shen , Jun Wang , Haitham Bou-Ammar

Reinforcement learning means learning a policy--a mapping of observations into actions--based on feedback from the environment. The learning can be viewed as browsing a set of policies while evaluating them by trial through interaction with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-05-25 Leonid Peshkin , Virginia Savova

In this paper, we present an online reinforcement learning algorithm for constrained Markov decision processes with a safety constraint. Despite the necessary attention of the scientific community, considering stochastic stopping time, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-26 Abhijit Mazumdar , Rafal Wisniewski , Manuela L. Bujorianu

Using reinforcement learning to learn control policies is a challenge when the task is complex with potentially long horizons. Ensuring adequate but safe exploration is also crucial for controlling physical systems. In this paper, we use…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-03-26 Xiao Li , Calin Belta

We revisit the Reinforce policy gradient algorithm from the literature. Note that this algorithm typically works with cost returns obtained over random length episodes obtained from either termination upon reaching a goal state (as with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-10 Shalabh Bhatnagar

Algorithmic recourse seeks to provide individuals with actionable recommendations that increase their chances of receiving favorable outcomes from automated decision systems (e.g., loan approvals). While prior research has emphasized…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Marina Ceccon , Alessandro Fabris , Goran Radanović , Asia J. Biega , Gian Antonio Susto

Model-free reinforcement learning methods lack an inherent mechanism to impose behavioural constraints on the trained policies. Although certain extensions exist, they remain limited to specific types of constraints, such as value…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-28 Bram De Cooman , Johan Suykens

We consider the problem of reinforcement learning when provided with (1) a baseline control policy and (2) a set of constraints that the learner must satisfy. The baseline policy can arise from demonstration data or a teacher agent and may…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-13 Tsung-Yen Yang , Justinian Rosca , Karthik Narasimhan , Peter J. Ramadge

Real-world applications of reinforcement learning often involve environments where agents operate on complex, high-dimensional observations, but the underlying (''latent'') dynamics are comparatively simple. However, outside of restrictive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-24 Philip Amortila , Dylan J. Foster , Nan Jiang , Akshay Krishnamurthy , Zakaria Mhammedi

The concept of the value-gradient is introduced and developed in the context of reinforcement learning. It is shown that by learning the value-gradients exploration or stochastic behaviour is no longer needed to find locally optimal…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2008-03-26 Michael Fairbank

We present a method to probe rare molecular dynamics trajectories directly using reinforcement learning. We consider trajectories that are conditioned to transition between regions of configuration space in finite time, like those relevant…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2022-01-07 Avishek Das , Dominic C. Rose , Juan P. Garrahan , David T. Limmer

Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms can suffer from poor sample efficiency when rewards are delayed and sparse. We introduce a solution that enables agents to learn temporally extended actions at multiple levels of abstraction in a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-03-11 Andrew Levy , Robert Platt , Kate Saenko

We study goal-conditioned RL through the lens of generalization, but not in the traditional sense of random augmentations and domain randomization. Rather, we aim to learn goal-directed policies that generalize with respect to the horizon:…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-29 Vivek Myers , Catherine Ji , Benjamin Eysenbach

Real-time path planning in constrained environments remains a fundamental challenge for autonomous systems. Traditional classical planners, while effective under perfect perception assumptions, are often sensitive to real-world perception…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Feng Tao , Luca Paparusso , Chenyi Gu , Robin Koehler , Chenxu Wu , Xinyu Huang , Christian Juette , David Paz , Ren Liu