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Relational Markov Decision Processes are a useful abstraction for complex reinforcement learning problems and stochastic planning problems. Recent work developed representation schemes and algorithms for planning in such problems using the…
Long-horizon tasks, which have a large discount factor, pose a challenge for most conventional reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms. Algorithms such as Value Iteration and Temporal Difference (TD) learning have a slow convergence rate and…
Reinforcement learning has achieved great success in many decision-making tasks, and traditional reinforcement learning algorithms are mainly designed for obtaining a single optimal solution. However, recent works show the importance of…
In this theoretical paper we are concerned with the problem of learning a value function by a smooth general function approximator, to solve a deterministic episodic control problem in a large continuous state space. It is shown that…
Entropy regularized algorithms such as Soft Q-learning and Soft Actor-Critic, recently showed state-of-the-art performance on a number of challenging reinforcement learning (RL) tasks. The regularized formulation modifies the standard RL…
This paper investigates the computational complexity of reinforcement learning in a novel linear function approximation regime, termed partial $q^{\pi}$-realizability. In this framework, the objective is to learn an $\epsilon$-optimal…
Feature selection and regularization are becoming increasingly prominent tools in the efforts of the reinforcement learning (RL) community to expand the reach and applicability of RL. One approach to the problem of feature selection is to…
Imitation learning algorithms learn a policy from demonstrations of expert behavior. We show that, for deterministic experts, imitation learning can be done by reduction to reinforcement learning with a stationary reward. Our theoretical…
Temporal difference learning (TD) is a simple iterative algorithm used to estimate the value function corresponding to a given policy in a Markov decision process. Although TD is one of the most widely used algorithms in reinforcement…
Gradient temporal difference (Gradient TD) algorithms are a popular class of stochastic approximation (SA) algorithms used for policy evaluation in reinforcement learning. Here, we consider Gradient TD algorithms with an additional heavy…
This paper provides a systematic comparison between Fitted Dynamic Programming (DP), where demand is estimated from data, and Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods in finite-horizon dynamic pricing problems. We analyze their performance…
Processes (MDPs) often require frequent decision making, that is, taking an action every microsecond, second, or minute. Infinite horizon discount reward formulation is still relevant for a large portion of these applications, because…
We explore fixed-horizon temporal difference (TD) methods, reinforcement learning algorithms for a new kind of value function that predicts the sum of rewards over a $\textit{fixed}$ number of future time steps. To learn the value function…
Value functions arise as a component of algorithms as well as performance metrics in statistics and engineering applications. Computation of the associated Bellman equations is numerically challenging in all but a few special cases. A…
We present a distributional approach to theoretical analyses of reinforcement learning algorithms for constant step-sizes. We demonstrate its effectiveness by presenting simple and unified proofs of convergence for a variety of…
This paper studies convergence rates for some value function approximations that arise in a collection of reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces (RKHS) $H(\Omega)$. By casting an optimal control problem in a specific class of native spaces,…
Off-policy learning allows us to learn about possible policies of behavior from experience generated by a different behavior policy. Temporal difference (TD) learning algorithms can become unstable when combined with function approximation…
Results on two different settings of asymptotic behavior of approximation characteristics of individual functions are presented. First, we discuss the following classical question for sparse approximation. Is it true that for any individual…
Imitation learning is an effective alternative approach to learn a policy when the reward function is sparse. In this paper, we consider a challenging setting where an agent and an expert use different actions from each other. We assume…
Existing on-policy imitation learning algorithms, such as DAgger, assume access to a fixed supervisor. However, there are many settings where the supervisor may evolve during policy learning, such as a human performing a novel task or an…