Related papers: Emphatic TD Bellman Operator is a Contraction
Stochastic and soft optimal policies resulting from entropy-regularized Markov decision processes (ER-MDP) are desirable for exploration and imitation learning applications. Motivated by the fact that such policies are sensitive with…
Temporal difference (TD) learning is one of the main foundations of modern reinforcement learning. This paper studies the use of TD(0), a canonical TD algorithm, to estimate the value function of a given policy from a batch of data. In this…
Extended Dynamic Mode Decomposition (EDMD) is an algorithm that approximates the action of the Koopman operator on an $N$-dimensional subspace of the space of observables by sampling at $M$ points in the state space. Assuming that the…
Offline reinforcement learning is important in domains such as medicine, economics, and e-commerce where online experimentation is costly, dangerous or unethical, and where the true model is unknown. However, most methods assume all…
We propose a stochastic approximation (SA) based method with randomization of samples for policy evaluation using the least squares temporal difference (LSTD) algorithm. Our proposed scheme is equivalent to running regular temporal…
Offline policy evaluation (OPE) is considered a fundamental and challenging problem in reinforcement learning (RL). This paper focuses on the value estimation of a target policy based on pre-collected data generated from a possibly…
Discounted reinforcement learning is usually presented through Bellman equations on closed Markov decision processes. This paper develops a compositional view: a one-step decision process is treated as an open stochastic component, and…
In this paper we study a model-based approach to calculating approximately optimal policies in Markovian Decision Processes. In particular, we derive novel bounds on the loss of using a policy derived from a factored linear model, a class…
Distributional reinforcement learning (DRL) has achieved empirical success in various domains. One core task in DRL is distributional policy evaluation, which involves estimating the return distribution $\eta^\pi$ for a given policy $\pi$.…
Extended Dynamic Mode Decomposition (EDMD) is a data-driven tool for forecasting and model reduction of dynamics, which has been extensively taken up in the physical sciences. While the method is conceptually simple, in deterministic chaos…
We consider off-policy evaluation of dynamic treatment rules under sequential ignorability, given an assumption that the underlying system can be modeled as a partially observed Markov decision process (POMDP). We propose an estimator,…
In this paper, we provide a unified analysis of temporal difference learning algorithms with linear function approximators by exploiting their connections to Markov jump linear systems (MJLS). We tailor the MJLS theory developed in the…
This paper deals with unconstrained discounted continuous-time Markov decision processes in Borel state and action spaces. Under some conditions imposed on the primitives, allowing unbounded transition rates and unbounded (from both above…
This work studies the problem of batch off-policy evaluation for Reinforcement Learning in partially observable environments. Off-policy evaluation under partial observability is inherently prone to bias, with risk of arbitrarily large…
Canonical models of Markov decision processes (MDPs) usually consider geometric discounting based on a constant discount factor. While this standard modeling approach has led to many elegant results, some recent studies indicate the…
Policy gradient methods are widely used for control in reinforcement learning, particularly for the continuous action setting. There have been a host of theoretically sound algorithms proposed for the on-policy setting, due to the existence…
We study distributional off-policy evaluation (OPE), of which the goal is to learn the distribution of the return for a target policy using offline data generated by a different policy. The theoretical foundation of many existing work…
Linear TD($\lambda$) is one of the most fundamental reinforcement learning algorithms for policy evaluation. Previously, convergence rates are typically established under the assumption of linearly independent features, which does not hold…
Tree-form sequential decision making (TFSDM) extends classical one-shot decision making by modeling tree-form interactions between an agent and a potentially adversarial environment. It captures the online decision-making problems that each…
We present the first finite-sample analysis of policy evaluation in robust average-reward Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). Prior work in this setting have established only asymptotic convergence guarantees, leaving open the question of…