Related papers: Learning Diagnostic Policies from Examples by Syst…
We study Markov Decision Processes (MDP) wherein states correspond to causal graphs that stochastically generate rewards. In this setup, the learner's goal is to identify atomic interventions that lead to high rewards by intervening on…
Combating an epidemic entails finding a plan that describes when and how to apply different interventions, such as mask-wearing mandates, vaccinations, school or workplace closures. An optimal plan will curb an epidemic with minimal loss of…
Finding different solutions to the same problem is a key aspect of intelligence associated with creativity and adaptation to novel situations. In reinforcement learning, a set of diverse policies can be useful for exploration, transfer,…
Markov decision processes (MDPs) describe sequential decision-making processes; MDP policies return for every state in that process an advised action. Classical algorithms can efficiently compute policies that are optimal with respect to,…
In this paper, we study the learning of safe policies in the setting of reinforcement learning problems. This is, we aim to control a Markov Decision Process (MDP) of which we do not know the transition probabilities, but we have access to…
We design scheduling policies that minimize a risk-sensitive cost criterion for a remote estimation setup. Since risk-sensitive cost objective takes into account not just the mean value of the cost, but also higher order moments of its…
We consider large-scale Markov decision processes (MDPs) with a risk measure of variability in cost, under the risk-aware MDPs paradigm. Previous studies showed that risk-aware MDPs, based on a minimax approach to handling risk, can be…
Bayesian approaches developed to solve the optimal design of sequential experiments are mathematically elegant but computationally challenging. Recently, techniques using amortization have been proposed to make these Bayesian approaches…
Bayesian optimization (BO) is a popular method for optimizing expensive-to-evaluate black-box functions. BO budgets are typically given in iterations, which implicitly assumes each evaluation has the same cost. In fact, in many BO…
Addressing uncertainty is critical for autonomous systems to robustly adapt to the real world. We formulate the problem of model uncertainty as a continuous Bayes-Adaptive Markov Decision Process (BAMDP), where an agent maintains a…
Policy gradient methods are among the most effective methods in challenging reinforcement learning problems with large state and/or action spaces. However, little is known about even their most basic theoretical convergence properties,…
Motivated by many application problems, we consider Markov decision processes (MDPs) with a general loss function and unknown parameters. To mitigate the epistemic uncertainty associated with unknown parameters, we take a Bayesian approach…
Policy Search and Model Predictive Control~(MPC) are two different paradigms for robot control: policy search has the strength of automatically learning complex policies using experienced data, while MPC can offer optimal control…
Constrained decision-making is essential for designing safe policies in real-world control systems, yet simulated environments often fail to capture real-world adversities. We consider the problem of learning a policy that will maximize the…
A basic model in sequential decision making is the Markov decision process (MDP), which is extended to Robust MDPs (RMDPs) by allowing uncertainty in transition probabilities and optimizing against the worst-case transition probabilities…
We propose and study a general framework for regularized Markov decision processes (MDPs) where the goal is to find an optimal policy that maximizes the expected discounted total reward plus a policy regularization term. The extant…
Policy-based algorithms are among the most widely adopted techniques in model-free RL, thanks to their strong theoretical groundings and good properties in continuous action spaces. Unfortunately, these methods require precise and…
This paper shows that the optimal policy and value functions of a Markov Decision Process (MDP), either discounted or not, can be captured by a finite-horizon undiscounted Optimal Control Problem (OCP), even if based on an inexact model.…
In this study, we apply reinforcement learning techniques and propose what we call reinforcement mechanism design to tackle the dynamic pricing problem in sponsored search auctions. In contrast to previous game-theoretical approaches that…
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…