Related papers: Policy Improvement for POMDPs Using Normalized Imp…
Most reinforcement learning algorithms take advantage of an experience replay buffer to repeatedly train on samples the agent has observed in the past. Not all samples carry the same amount of significance and simply assigning equal…
We consider off-policy policy evaluation with function approximation (FA) in average-reward MDPs, where the goal is to estimate both the reward rate and the differential value function. For this problem, bootstrapping is necessary and,…
Decision-making under uncertainty is a crucial ability for autonomous systems. In its most general form, this problem can be formulated as a Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP). The solution policy of a POMDP can be…
Variational inference approximates the posterior distribution of a probabilistic model with a parameterized density by maximizing a lower bound for the model evidence. Modern solutions fit a flexible approximation with stochastic gradient…
Policy gradient methods are among the most effective methods for large-scale reinforcement learning, and their empirical success has prompted several works that develop the foundation of their global convergence theory. However, prior works…
Policy optimization methods are popular reinforcement learning algorithms, because their incremental and on-policy nature makes them more stable than the value-based counterparts. However, the same properties also make them slow to converge…
A common technique in reinforcement learning is to evaluate the value function from Monte Carlo simulations of a given policy, and use the estimated value function to obtain a new policy which is greedy with respect to the estimated value…
Driven by applications in telecommunication networks, we explore the simulation task of estimating rare event probabilities for tandem queues in their steady state. Existing literature has recognized that importance sampling methods can be…
We study Reinforcement Learning for partially observable dynamical systems using function approximation. We propose a new \textit{Partially Observable Bilinear Actor-Critic framework}, that is general enough to include models such as…
Markov decision processes (MDPs) is viewed as an optimization of an objective function over certain linear operators over general function spaces. A new existence result is established for the existence of optimal policies in general MDPs,…
We present decentralized rollout sampling policy iteration (DecRSPI) - a new algorithm for multi-agent decision problems formalized as DEC-POMDPs. DecRSPI is designed to improve scalability and tackle problems that lack an explicit model.…
In real-world reinforcement learning (RL) scenarios, agents often encounter partial observability, where incomplete or noisy information obscures the true state of the environment. Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs) are…
As artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms are increasingly used in mission-critical applications, promoting user-trust of these systems will be essential to their success. Ensuring users understand the models over which algorithms reason…
Policy gradient methods are extensively used in reinforcement learning as a way to optimize expected return. In this paper, we explore the evolution of the policy parameters, for a special class of exactly solvable POMDPs, as a…
Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs) are the standard framework for decision-making under uncertainty. While sampling-based methods scale well, they lack formal correctness guarantees, making them unsuitable for…
This article presents new methodology for sample-based Bayesian inference when data are partitioned and communication between the parts is expensive, as arises by necessity in the context of "big data" or by choice in order to take…
Matching users based on mutual preferences is a fundamental aspect of services driven by reciprocal recommendations, such as job search and dating applications. Although A/B tests remain the gold standard for evaluating new policies in…
Adaptive experiments, including efficient average treatment effect estimation and multi-armed bandit algorithms, have garnered attention in various applications, such as social experiments, clinical trials, and online advertisement…
Off-policy evaluation (OPE) is a method for estimating the return of a target policy using some pre-collected observational data generated by a potentially different behavior policy. In some cases, there may be unmeasured variables that can…
This paper aims to build a probabilistic framework for Howard's policy iteration algorithm using the language of forward-backward stochastic differential equations (FBSDEs). As opposed to conventional formulations based on partial…