Related papers: On the Performance Bounds of some Policy Search Dy…
We investigate the problem of best policy identification in discounted linear Markov Decision Processes in the fixed confidence setting under a generative model. We first derive an instance-specific lower bound on the expected number of…
This paper proposes a general incremental policy iteration adaptive dynamic programming (ADP) algorithm for model-free robust optimal control of unknown nonlinear systems. The approach integrates recursive least squares estimation with…
We study policy optimization in an infinite horizon, $\gamma$-discounted constrained Markov decision process (CMDP). Our objective is to return a policy that achieves large expected reward with a small constraint violation. We consider the…
We propose a physics-informed neural network policy iteration (PINN-PI) framework for solving stochastic optimal control problems governed by second-order Hamilton--Jacobi--Bellman (HJB) equations. At each iteration, a neural network is…
We study the policy testing problem in discounted Markov decision processes (MDPs) in the fixed-confidence setting under a generative model with static sampling. The goal is to decide whether the value of a given policy exceeds a specified…
Our goal is to compute a policy that guarantees improved return over a baseline policy even when the available MDP model is inaccurate. The inaccurate model may be constructed, for example, by system identification techniques when the true…
Many policy-based reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms can be viewed as instantiations of approximate policy iteration (PI), i.e., where policy improvement and policy evaluation are both performed approximately. In applications where the…
Policy Mirror Descent (PMD) is a general family of algorithms that covers a wide range of novel and fundamental methods in reinforcement learning. Motivated by the instability of policy iteration (PI) with inexact policy evaluation, PMD…
In this paper, we show how a simulated Markov decision process (MDP) built by the so-called \emph{baseline} policies, can be used to compute a different policy, namely the \emph{simulated optimal} policy, for which the performance of this…
We present discrete-time approximation of optimal control policies for infinite horizon discounted/ergodic control problems for controlled diffusions in $\Rd$\,. In particular, our objective is to show near optimality of optimal policies…
Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) have been used to formulate many decision-making problems in science and engineering. The objective is to synthesize the best decision (action selection) policies to maximize expected rewards (minimize…
For many applications of reinforcement learning it can be more convenient to specify both a reward function and constraints, rather than trying to design behavior through the reward function. For example, systems that physically interact…
We address the problem of finding the optimal policy of a constrained Markov decision process (CMDP) using a gradient descent-based algorithm. Previous results have shown that a primal-dual approach can achieve an $\mathcal{O}(1/\sqrt{T})$…
We present a memory-bounded optimization approach for solving infinite-horizon decentralized POMDPs. Policies for each agent are represented by stochastic finite state controllers. We formulate the problem of optimizing these policies as a…
This paper is concerned with the convergence rate of policy iteration for (deterministic) optimal control problems in continuous time. To overcome the problem of ill-posedness due to lack of regularity, we consider a semi-discrete scheme by…
We consider discounted infinite-horizon constrained Markov decision processes (CMDPs), where the goal is to find an optimal policy that maximizes the expected cumulative reward while satisfying expected cumulative constraints. Motivated by…
Bounded policy iteration is an approach to solving infinite-horizon POMDPs that represents policies as stochastic finite-state controllers and iteratively improves a controller by adjusting the parameters of each node using linear…
Solving partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) is highly intractable in general, at least in part because the optimal policy may be infinitely large. In this paper, we explore the problem of finding the optimal policy from…
This paper addresses the problem of optimal control of robotic sensing systems aimed at autonomous information gathering in scenarios such as environmental monitoring, search and rescue, and surveillance and reconnaissance. The information…
In this paper we discuss $\l$-policy iteration, a method for exact and approximate dynamic programming. It is intermediate between the classical value iteration (VI) and policy iteration (PI) methods, and it is closely related to optimistic…