Related papers: Reinforcement Learning with Action-Triggered Obser…
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…
Recent studies have greatly improved reinforcement learning, and an increased interest in real-world implementation has emerged. In many cases, the implementation is challenged by time-varying disturbances as it introduces hidden states,…
In supervised learning, we fit a single statistical model to a given data set, assuming that the data is associated with a singular task, which yields well-tuned models for specific use, but does not adapt well to new contexts. By contrast,…
In most real-world reinforcement learning applications, state information is only partially observable, which breaks the Markov decision process assumption and leads to inferior performance for algorithms that conflate observations with…
We address the problem of reinforcement learning in which observations may exhibit an arbitrary form of stochastic dependence on past observations and actions. The task for an agent is to attain the best possible asymptotic reward where the…
General purpose intelligent learning agents cycle through (complex,non-MDP) sequences of observations, actions, and rewards. On the other hand, reinforcement learning is well-developed for small finite state Markov Decision Processes…
To ensure the usefulness of Reinforcement Learning (RL) in real systems, it is crucial to ensure they are robust to noise and adversarial attacks. In adversarial RL, an external attacker has the power to manipulate the victim agent's…
The problem of selecting the right state-representation in a reinforcement learning problem is considered. Several models (functions mapping past observations to a finite set) of the observations are given, and it is known that for at least…
A major component of overfitting in model-free reinforcement learning (RL) involves the case where the agent may mistakenly correlate reward with certain spurious features from the observations generated by the Markov Decision Process…
Optimal decision making with limited or no information in stochastic environments where multiple agents interact is a challenging topic in the realm of artificial intelligence. Reinforcement learning (RL) is a popular approach for arriving…
In standard Reinforcement Learning (RL) settings, the interaction between the agent and the environment is typically modeled as a Markov Decision Process (MDP), which assumes that the agent observes the system state instantaneously, selects…
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…
We study tabular reinforcement learning problems with multiple steps of lookahead information. Before acting, the learner observes $\ell$ steps of future transition and reward realizations: the exact state the agent would reach and the…
In many sequential decision-making problems one is interested in minimizing an expected cumulative cost while taking into account \emph{risk}, i.e., increased awareness of events of small probability and high consequences. Accordingly, the…
Many control tasks exhibit similar dynamics that can be modeled as having common latent structure. Hidden-Parameter Markov Decision Processes (HiP-MDPs) explicitly model this structure to improve sample efficiency in multi-task settings.…
Many applications -- including power systems, robotics, and economics -- involve a dynamical system interacting with a stochastic and hard-to-model environment. We adopt a reinforcement learning approach to control such systems.…
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…
We propose and study a new model for reinforcement learning with rich observations, generalizing contextual bandits to sequential decision making. These models require an agent to take actions based on observations (features) with the goal…
In the predict-then-optimize framework, the objective is to train a predictive model, mapping from environment features to parameters of an optimization problem, which maximizes decision quality when the optimization is subsequently solved.…
Safe reinforcement learning has been a promising approach for optimizing the policy of an agent that operates in safety-critical applications. In this paper, we propose an algorithm, SNO-MDP, that explores and optimizes Markov decision…