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With the increasing need for handling large state and action spaces, general function approximation has become a key technique in reinforcement learning (RL). In this paper, we propose a general framework that unifies model-based and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-03 Zixiang Chen , Chris Junchi Li , Angela Yuan , Quanquan Gu , Michael I. Jordan

Having access to an exploring restart distribution (the so-called wide coverage assumption) is critical with policy gradient methods. This is due to the fact that, while the objective function is insensitive to updates in unlikely states,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-30 Marco Miani , Maurizio Parton , Marco Romito

This paper presents a scalable and fault-tolerant framework for unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) mission management in complex and uncertain environments. The proposed approach addresses the computational bottleneck inherent in solving…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-12-02 Md Muzakkir Quamar , Ali Nasir , Sami ELFerik

Active classification, i.e., the sequential decision-making process aimed at data acquisition for classification purposes, arises naturally in many applications, including medical diagnosis, intrusion detection, and object tracking. In this…

Systems and Control · Computer Science 2018-10-02 Bo Wu , Mohamadreza Ahmadi , Suda Bharadwaj , Ufuk Topcu

The key assumption underlying linear Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) is that the learner has access to a known feature map $\phi(x, a)$ that maps state-action pairs to $d$-dimensional vectors, and that the rewards and transitions are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-20 Noah Golowich , Ankur Moitra , Dhruv Rohatgi

Sample-efficient exploration is crucial not only for discovering rewarding experiences but also for adapting to environment changes in a task-agnostic fashion. A principled treatment of the problem of optimal input synthesis for system…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-10 Matthias Schultheis , Boris Belousov , Hany Abdulsamad , Jan Peters

We present a general framework for applying machine-learning algorithms to the verification of Markov decision processes (MDPs). The primary goal of these techniques is to improve performance by avoiding an exhaustive exploration of the…

Collecting and leveraging data with good coverage properties plays a crucial role in different aspects of reinforcement learning (RL), including reward-free exploration and offline learning. However, the notion of "good coverage" really…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-26 Aymen Al-Marjani , Andrea Tirinzoni , Emilie Kaufmann

We propose a safe exploration algorithm for deterministic Markov Decision Processes with unknown transition models. Our algorithm guarantees safety by leveraging Lipschitz-continuity to ensure that no unsafe states are visited during…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-06-05 Erdem Bıyık , Jonathan Margoliash , Shahrouz Ryan Alimo , Dorsa Sadigh

We study reward-free reinforcement learning (RL) with linear function approximation, where the agent works in two phases: (1) in the exploration phase, the agent interacts with the environment but cannot access the reward; and (2) in the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-15 Junkai Zhang , Weitong Zhang , Quanquan Gu

Recent years have witnessed a tremendous improvement of deep reinforcement learning. However, a challenging problem is that an agent may suffer from inefficient exploration, particularly for on-policy methods. Previous exploration methods…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-17 Ling Pan , Qingpeng Cai , Longbo Huang

Gaussian Process (GP) models have also become extremely useful for optimization under uncertainty algorithms, especially where the objective functions are costly to compute. Yet, the more classical methods usually adopt strategies that, in…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-07-22 Nishant Gadde

We study offline Reinforcement Learning in large infinite-horizon discounted Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) when the reward and transition models are linearly realizable under a known feature map. Starting from the classic linear-program…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-24 Gergely Neu , Nneka Okolo

In the zero-shot policy transfer (ZSPT) setting for contextual Markov decision processes (MDP), agents train on a fixed set of contexts and must generalise to new ones. Recent work has argued and demonstrated that increased exploration can…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-23 Max Weltevrede , Caroline Horsch , Matthijs T. J. Spaan , Wendelin Böhmer

Markov decision processes (MDPs) are a popular model for performance analysis and optimization of stochastic systems. The parameters of stochastic behavior of MDPs are estimates from empirical observations of a system; their values are not…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-10-26 Dimitri Scheftelowitsch , Peter Buchholz , Vahid Hashemi , Holger Hermanns

Large-scale Markov decision processes (MDPs) require planning algorithms with runtime independent of the number of states of the MDP. We consider the planning problem in MDPs using linear value function approximation with only weak…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-14 Roshan Shariff , Csaba Szepesvári

One of the challenges in online reinforcement learning (RL) is that the agent needs to trade off the exploration of the environment and the exploitation of the samples to optimize its behavior. Whether we optimize for regret, sample…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-19 Jean Tarbouriech , Matteo Pirotta , Michal Valko , Alessandro Lazaric

Learning a Markov Decision Process (MDP) from a fixed batch of trajectories is a non-trivial task whose outcome's quality depends on both the amount and the diversity of the sampled regions of the state-action space. Yet, many MDPs are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-08 Giorgio Angelotti , Nicolas Drougard , Caroline P. C. Chanel

We consider an agent who is involved in a Markov decision process and receives a vector of outcomes every round. Her objective is to maximize a global concave reward function on the average vectorial outcome. The problem models applications…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-17 Wang Chi Cheung

Model checking undiscounted reachability and expected-reward properties on Markov decision processes (MDPs) is key for the verification of systems that act under uncertainty. Popular algorithms are policy iteration and variants of value…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2023-01-25 Arnd Hartmanns , Sebastian Junges , Tim Quatmann , Maximilian Weininger