Related papers: $\kappa$-Explorer: A Unified Framework for Active …
This paper investigates natural conditions for the existence of optimal policies for a Markov decision process with incomplete information (MDPII) and with expected total costs. The MDPII is the classic model of a controlled stochastic…
We consider discounted infinite-horizon constrained Markov decision processes (CMDPs), where the goal is to find an optimal policy that maximizes the expected cumulative reward while satisfying expected cumulative constraints. Motivated by…
Model-based reinforcement learning (RL) is appealing because (i) it enables planning and thus more strategic exploration, and (ii) by decoupling dynamics from rewards, it enables fast transfer to new reward functions. However, learning an…
The online Markov decision process (MDP) is a generalization of the classical Markov decision process that incorporates changing reward functions. In this paper, we propose practical online MDP algorithms with policy iteration and…
A key challenge to deploying reinforcement learning in practice is avoiding excessive (harmful) exploration in individual episodes. We propose a natural constraint on exploration -- \textit{uniformly} outperforming a conservative policy…
In many real-world decision problems there is partially observed, hidden or latent information that remains fixed throughout an interaction. Such decision problems can be modeled as Latent Markov Decision Processes (LMDPs), where a latent…
We study model-based learning of finite-window policies in tabular partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs). A common approach to learning under partial observability is to approximate unbounded history dependencies using…
We study infinite-horizon Discounted Markov Decision Processes (DMDPs) under a generative model. Motivated by the Algorithm with Advice framework Mitzenmacher and Vassilvitskii 2022, we propose a novel framework to investigate how a…
Adaptive exploration methods propose ways to learn complex policies via alternating between exploration and exploitation. An important question for such methods is to determine the appropriate moment to switch between exploration and…
We study the Safe Reinforcement Learning (SRL) problem using the Constrained Markov Decision Process (CMDP) formulation in which an agent aims to maximize the expected total reward subject to a safety constraint on the expected total value…
Policy optimization is a widely-used method in reinforcement learning. Due to its local-search nature, however, theoretical guarantees on global optimality often rely on extra assumptions on the Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) that bypass…
Interval Markov decision processes are a class of Markov models where the transition probabilities between the states belong to intervals. In this paper, we study the problem of efficient estimation of the optimal policies in Interval…
Direct policy gradient methods for reinforcement learning are a successful approach for a variety of reasons: they are model free, they directly optimize the performance metric of interest, and they allow for richly parameterized policies.…
Exploration is critical for solving real-world decision-making problems such as scientific discovery, where the objective is to generate truly novel designs rather than mimic existing data distributions. In this work, we address the…
Markov decision processes (MDPs) are used to model a wide variety of applications ranging from game playing over robotics to finance. Their optimal policy typically maximizes the expected sum of rewards given at each step of the decision…
A general-purpose planning agent requires an open-scope world model: one rich enough to tackle any of the wide range of tasks it may be asked to solve over its operational lifetime. This stands in contrast with typical planning approaches,…
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…
We study and provide efficient algorithms for multi-objective model checking problems for Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). Given an MDP, M, and given multiple linear-time (\omega -regular or LTL) properties \varphi\_i, and probabilities…
Kappa distributions are widely used in space plasma physics to model velocity distribution functions with heavy tails. Parameter estimation in these distributions is, however, complicated by the fact that the kappa distribution does not…
In this paper, we consider a modified version of the control problem in a model free Markov decision process (MDP) setting with large state and action spaces. The control problem most commonly addressed in the contemporary literature is to…