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Related papers: Online Bayesian Risk-Averse Reinforcement Learning

200 papers

Popular offline reinforcement learning (RL) methods rely on explicit conservatism, penalizing out-of-dataset actions or restricting rollout horizons. We question the universality of this principle and revisit a complementary Bayesian…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-04 Tianwei Ni , Esther Derman , Vineet Jain , Vincent Taboga , Siamak Ravanbakhsh , Pierre-Luc Bacon

In many real-world settings, reinforcement learning systems suffer performance degradation when the environment encountered at deployment differs from that observed during training. Distributionally robust reinforcement learning (DR-RL)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-05 Debamita Ghosh , George K. Atia , Yue Wang

Reinforcement learning (RL) can be used to create a tactical decision-making agent for autonomous driving. However, previous approaches only output decisions and do not provide information about the agent's confidence in the recommended…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-11-04 Carl-Johan Hoel , Krister Wolff , Leo Laine

This work advances randomized exploration in reinforcement learning (RL) with function approximation modeled by linear mixture MDPs. We establish the first prior-dependent Bayesian regret bound for RL with function approximation; and refine…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-03-19 Yingru Li , Zhi-Quan Luo

In this paper, we address the following problem: Given an offline demonstration dataset from an imperfect expert, what is the best way to leverage it to bootstrap online learning performance in MDPs. We first propose an Informed Posterior…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-18 Botao Hao , Rahul Jain , Dengwang Tang , Zheng Wen

We investigate the fundamental problem of leveraging offline data to accelerate online reinforcement learning - a direction with strong potential but limited theoretical grounding. Our study centers on how to learn and apply value envelopes…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-10-23 Sebastian Reboul , Hélène Halconruy , Randal Douc

We consider a Bayesian approach to offline model-based inverse reinforcement learning (IRL). The proposed framework differs from existing offline model-based IRL approaches by performing simultaneous estimation of the expert's reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-09 Ran Wei , Siliang Zeng , Chenliang Li , Alfredo Garcia , Anthony McDonald , Mingyi Hong

We consider a class of restless multi-armed bandit (RMAB) problems with unknown arm dynamics. At each time, a player chooses an arm out of N arms to play, referred to as an active arm, and receives a random reward from a finite set of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-20 Tomer Gafni , Kobi Cohen

Reward-biased maximum likelihood estimation (RBMLE) is a classic principle in the adaptive control literature for tackling explore-exploit trade-offs. This paper studies the stochastic contextual bandit problem with general bounded reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-31 Yu-Heng Hung , Ping-Chun Hsieh

A Markov Decision Process (MDP) is a popular model for reinforcement learning. However, its commonly used assumption of stationary dynamics and rewards is too stringent and fails to hold in adversarial, nonstationary, or multi-agent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-08-22 Tiancheng Yu , Suvrit Sra

Safe reinforcement learning (RL) is a promising approach for many real-world decision-making problems where ensuring safety is a critical necessity. In safe RL research, while expected cumulative safety constraints (ECSCs) are typically the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-10 Xun Shen , Shuo Jiang , Akifumi Wachi , Kaumune Hashimoto , Sebastien Gros

Reinforcement learning (RL) provides a principled framework for decision-making in partially observable environments, which can be modeled as Markov decision processes and compactly represented through dynamic decision Bayesian networks.…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2025-07-25 Gilberto Cunha , Alexandra Ramôa , André Sequeira , Michael de Oliveira , Luís Barbosa

In several reinforcement learning (RL) scenarios, mainly in security settings, there may be adversaries trying to interfere with the reward generating process. In this paper, we introduce Threatened Markov Decision Processes (TMDPs), which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-28 Victor Gallego , Roi Naveiro , David Rios Insua

We study a primal-dual (PD) reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm for online constrained Markov decision processes (CMDPs). Despite its widespread practical use, the existing theoretical literature on PD-RL algorithms for this problem only…

One of the main challenges in imitation learning is determining what action an agent should take when outside the state distribution of the demonstrations. Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) can enable generalization to new states by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-04 Daniel S. Brown , Scott Niekum , Marek Petrik

We study the estimation of risk-sensitive policies in reinforcement learning problems defined by a Markov Decision Process (MDPs) whose state and action spaces are countably finite. Prior efforts are predominately afflicted by computational…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-03-02 Junyu Zhang , Amrit Singh Bedi , Mengdi Wang , Alec Koppel

Robust Markov decision processes (RMDPs) extend standard Markov decision processes (MDPs) to account for uncertainty in the transition probabilities. RMDPs have an uncertainty set that defines a set of possible transition functions, each of…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2026-04-30 Marnix Suilen , Guillermo A. Pérez

We propose a reinforcement learning (RL) framework under a broad class of risk objectives, characterized by convex scoring functions. This class covers many common risk measures, such as variance, Expected Shortfall, entropic Value-at-Risk,…

Mathematical Finance · Quantitative Finance 2025-05-16 Shanyu Han , Yang Liu , Xiang Yu

This paper targets the efficient construction of a safety shield for decision making in scenarios that incorporate uncertainty. Markov decision processes (MDPs) are prominent models to capture such planning problems. Reinforcement learning…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2019-11-26 Nils Jansen , Bettina Könighofer , Sebastian Junges , Alexandru C. Serban , Roderick Bloem

Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) describes the problem of learning an unknown reward function of a Markov Decision Process (MDP) from observed behavior of an agent. Since the agent's behavior originates in its policy and MDP policies…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2016-04-14 Michael Herman , Tobias Gindele , Jörg Wagner , Felix Schmitt , Wolfram Burgard