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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

We tackle the problem of acting in an unknown finite and discrete Markov Decision Process (MDP) for which the expected shortest path from any state to any other state is bounded by a finite number $D$. An MDP consists of $S$ states and $A$…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-07-11 Aristide Tossou , Christos Dimitrakakis , Debabrota Basu

Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) are mathematical models of sequential decision-making under uncertainty that have found applications in healthcare, manufacturing, logistics, and others. In these models, a decision-maker observes the state…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-05-22 Madeleine Pollack , Lauren N. Steimle

The aim of this paper is to approximate a finite-state Markov process by another process with fewer states, called herein the approximating process. The approximation problem is formulated using two different methods. The first method,…

Markov decision processes (MDP) and continuous-time MDP (CTMDP) are the fundamental models for non-deterministic systems with probabilistic uncertainty. Mean payoff (a.k.a. long-run average reward) is one of the most classic objectives…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2022-06-06 Chaitanya Agarwal , Shibashis Guha , Jan Křetínský , M. Pazhamalai

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-17 Daiqi Gao , Ziping Xu , Aseel Rawashdeh , Predrag Klasnja , Susan A. Murphy

To learn directed behaviors in complex environments, intelligent agents need to optimize objective functions. Various objectives are known for designing artificial agents, including task rewards and intrinsic motivation. However, it is…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-02-15 Danijar Hafner , Pedro A. Ortega , Jimmy Ba , Thomas Parr , Karl Friston , Nicolas Heess

Deep RL approaches build much of their success on the ability of the deep neural network to generate useful internal representations. Nevertheless, they suffer from a high sample-complexity and starting with a good input representation can…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-17 Vikram Waradpande , Daniel Kudenko , Megha Khosla

Imitation learning (IL) aims to mimic the behavior of an expert policy in a sequential decision-making problem given only demonstrations. In this paper, we focus on understanding the minimax statistical limits of IL in episodic Markov…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-09-15 Nived Rajaraman , Lin F. Yang , Jiantao Jiao , Kannan Ramachandran

Interval Markov Decision Processes (IMDPs) are finite-state uncertain Markov models, where the transition probabilities belong to intervals. Recently, there has been a surge of research on employing IMDPs as abstractions of stochastic…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-02-18 Giannis Delimpaltadakis , Morteza Lahijanian , Manuel Mazo , Luca Laurenti

Solving control tasks in complex environments automatically through learning offers great potential. While contemporary techniques from deep reinforcement learning (DRL) provide effective solutions, their decision-making is not transparent.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-03 Martin Tappler , Edi Muškardin , Bernhard K. Aichernig , Bettina Könighofer

Partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) are a general framework for sequential decision-making under latent state uncertainty, yet learning in POMDPs is intractable in the worst case. Motivated by sensing and probing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-27 Ming Shi , Yingbin Liang , Ness B. Shroff

Diversity plays a crucial role in improving the performance of multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL). Currently, many diversity-based methods have been developed to overcome the drawbacks of excessive parameter sharing in traditional…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2024-01-30 Tianyi Hu , Zhiqiang Pu , Xiaolin Ai , Tenghai Qiu , Jianqiang Yi

Most of the works on planning and learning, e.g., planning by (model based) reinforcement learning, are based on two main assumptions: (i) the set of states of the planning domain is fixed; (ii) the mapping between the observations from the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-11-27 Luciano Serafini , Paolo Traverso

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-14 Esther Derman , Gal Dalal , Shie Mannor

Quadruped locomotion provides a natural setting for understanding when model-free learning can outperform model-based control design, by exploiting data patterns to bypass the difficulty of optimizing over discrete contacts and the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Ruipeng Zhang , Hongzhan Yu , Ya-Chien Chang , Chenghao Li , Henrik I. Christensen , Sicun Gao

Advances in mobile computing technologies have made it possible to monitor and apply data-driven interventions across complex systems in real time. Markov decision processes (MDPs) are the primary model for sequential decision problems with…

Methodology · Statistics 2018-03-20 Longshaokan Wang , Eric B. Laber , Katie Witkiewitz

The Markov assumption (MA) is fundamental to the empirical validity of reinforcement learning. In this paper, we propose a novel Forward-Backward Learning procedure to test MA in sequential decision making. The proposed test does not assume…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-02-06 Chengchun Shi , Runzhe Wan , Rui Song , Wenbin Lu , Ling Leng

Reinforcement learning requires manual specification of a reward function to learn a task. While in principle this reward function only needs to specify the task goal, in practice reinforcement learning can be very time-consuming or even…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-17 Kristian Hartikainen , Xinyang Geng , Tuomas Haarnoja , Sergey Levine

Reinforcement learning in non-stationary environments is challenging due to abrupt and unpredictable changes in dynamics, often causing traditional algorithms to fail to converge. However, in many real-world cases, non-stationarity has some…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-25 Mohsen Amiri , Sindri Magnússon