Related papers: Selecting the State-Representation in Reinforcemen…
Choosing an appropriate representation of the environment for the underlying decision-making process of the reinforcement learning agent is not always straightforward. The state representation should be inclusive enough to allow the agent…
We establish that an optimistic variant of Q-learning applied to a fixed-horizon episodic Markov decision process with an aggregated state representation incurs regret $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(\sqrt{H^5 M K} + \epsilon HK)$, where $H$ is the…
While reinforcement learning has been increasingly applied to stochastic control, few studies have systematically examined policy-based methods in queuing environments modeled as a semi-Markov decision process (SMDP). To address this gap,…
Reinforcement Learning is a powerful framework for training agents to navigate different situations, but it is susceptible to changes in environmental dynamics. However, solving Markov Decision Processes that are robust to changes is…
We study the use of inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) as a tool for the recognition of agents' behavior on the basis of observation of their sequential decision behavior interacting with the environment. We model the problem faced by the…
Representation learning becomes especially important for complex systems with multimodal data sources such as cameras or sensors. Recent advances in reinforcement learning and optimal control make it possible to design control algorithms on…
Real-world decision-making problems are often partially observable, and many can be formulated as a Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP). When we apply reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms to the POMDP, reasonable…
In these notes we will tackle the problem of finding optimal policies for Markov decision processes (MDPs) which are not fully known to us. Our intention is to slowly transition from an offline setting to an online (learning) setting.…
We present one of the first algorithms on model based reinforcement learning and trajectory optimization with free final time horizon. Grounded on the optimal control theory and Dynamic Programming, we derive a set of backward differential…
We study tabular reinforcement learning problems with multiple steps of lookahead information. Before acting, the learner observes $\ell$ steps of future transition and reward realizations: the exact state the agent would reach and the…
We study reinforcement learning for continuous-time Markov decision processes (MDPs) in the finite-horizon episodic setting. In contrast to discrete-time MDPs, the inter-transition times of a continuous-time MDP are exponentially…
Motivated by the novel paradigm developed by Van Roy and coauthors for reinforcement learning in arbitrary non-Markovian environments, we propose a related formulation and explicitly pin down the error caused by non-Markovianity of…
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…
We introduce the forward-backward (FB) representation of the dynamics of a reward-free Markov decision process. It provides explicit near-optimal policies for any reward specified a posteriori. During an unsupervised phase, we use…
In this work, we consider the regret minimization problem for reinforcement learning in latent Markov Decision Processes (LMDP). In an LMDP, an MDP is randomly drawn from a set of $M$ possible MDPs at the beginning of the interaction, but…
Reinforcement learning studies how an agent should interact with an environment to maximize its cumulative reward. A standard way to study this question abstractly is to ask how many samples an agent needs from the environment to learn an…
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…
This paper investigates MDPs with intermittent state information. We consider a scenario where the controller perceives the state information of the process via an unreliable communication channel. The transmissions of state information…
Traditionally, Reinforcement Learning (RL) aims at deciding how to act optimally for an artificial agent. We argue that deciding when to act is equally important. As humans, we drift from default, instinctive or memorized behaviors to…
Reinforcement learning (RL) in episodic, factored Markov decision processes (FMDPs) is studied. We propose an algorithm called FMDP-BF, which leverages the factorization structure of FMDP. The regret of FMDP-BF is shown to be exponentially…