Related papers: Near-Optimal BRL using Optimistic Local Transition…

Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms aim to learn optimal decisions in unknown environments through experience of taking actions and observing the rewards gained. In some cases, the environment is not influenced by the actions of the RL…

Deep reinforcement learning (RL) approaches have been broadly applied to a large number of robotics tasks, such as robot manipulation and autonomous driving. However, an open problem in deep RL is learning policies that are robust to…

We consider the problem of finding optimal policies for a Markov Decision Process with almost sure constraints on state transitions and action triplets. We define value and action-value functions that satisfy a barrier-based decomposition…

Bayesian reinforcement learning (RL) offers a principled and elegant approach for sequential decision making under uncertainty. Most notably, Bayesian agents do not face an exploration/exploitation dilemma, a major pathology of frequentist…

Posterior sampling for high-dimensional Bayesian inverse problems is a common challenge in real-world applications. Randomized Maximum Likelihood (RML) is an optimization based methodology that gives samples from an approximation to the…

We consider un-discounted reinforcement learning (RL) in Markov decision processes (MDPs) under temporal drifts, ie, both the reward and state transition distributions are allowed to evolve over time, as long as their respective total…

Behavior Trees (BTs) provide a structured and reactive framework for decision-making, commonly used to switch between sub-controllers based on environmental conditions. Reinforcement Learning (RL), on the other hand, can learn near-optimal…

The generalization of model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) methods to environments with unseen transition dynamics is an important yet challenging problem. Existing methods try to extract environment-specified information $Z$ from past…

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) enables policy learning from static data but often suffers from poor coverage of the state-action space and distributional shift problems. This problem can be addressed by allowing limited online…

Developments in reinforcement learning (RL) have allowed algorithms to achieve impressive performance in highly complex, but largely static problems. In contrast, biological learning seems to value efficiency of adaptation to a…

Many traditional algorithms for solving combinatorial optimization problems involve using hand-crafted heuristics that sequentially construct a solution. Such heuristics are designed by domain experts and may often be suboptimal due to the…

To ensure that large language model (LLM) responses are helpful and non-toxic, a reward model trained on human preference data is usually used. LLM responses with high rewards are then selected through best-of-$n$ (BoN) sampling or the LLM…

Adapting large pre-trained models to unseen tasks under tight data and compute budgets remains challenging. Meta-learning approaches explicitly learn good initializations, but they require an additional meta-training phase over many tasks,…

We provide a framework for accelerating reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms by heuristics constructed from domain knowledge or offline data. Tabula rasa RL algorithms require environment interactions or computation that scales with the…

Consider mutli-goal tasks that involve static environments and dynamic goals. Examples of such tasks, such as goal-directed navigation and pick-and-place in robotics, abound. Two types of Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms are used for…

Preference-based Reinforcement Learning (PbRL) is a paradigm in which an RL agent learns to optimize a task using pair-wise preference-based feedback over trajectories, rather than explicit reward signals. While PbRL has demonstrated…

Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) has become the predominant algorithm for on-policy reinforcement learning due to its scalability and empirical robustness across domains. However, there is a significant disconnect between the underlying…

Reinforcement learning (RL) methods learn optimal decisions in the presence of a stationary environment. However, the stationary assumption on the environment is very restrictive. In many real world problems like traffic signal control,…

Offline model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) serves as a competitive framework that can learn well-performing policies solely from pre-collected data with the help of learned dynamics models. To fully unleash the power of offline MBRL,…

Reinforcement learning (RL) aims to find an optimal policy by interaction with an environment. Consequently, learning complex behavior requires a vast number of samples, which can be prohibitive in practice. Nevertheless, instead of…