Related papers: Is the Bellman residual a bad proxy?
The gloabal objective of inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) is to estimate the unknown cost function of some MDP base on observed trajectories generated by (approximate) optimal policies. The classical approach consists in tuning this…
Prior work has proposed a simple strategy for reinforcement learning (RL): label experience with the outcomes achieved in that experience, and then imitate the relabeled experience. These outcome-conditioned imitation learning methods are…
In classic reinforcement learning (RL) and decision making problems, policies are evaluated with respect to a scalar reward function, and all optimal policies are the same with regards to their expected return. However, many real-world…
Some researchers speculate that intelligent reinforcement learning (RL) agents would be incentivized to seek resources and power in pursuit of their objectives. Other researchers point out that RL agents need not have human-like…
In this work, we address the problem of determining reliable policies in reinforcement learning (RL), with a focus on optimization under uncertainty and the need for performance guarantees. While classical RL algorithms aim at maximizing…
Reinforcement learning optimizes policies for expected cumulative reward. Need the supervision be so narrow? Reward is delayed and sparse for many tasks, making it a difficult and impoverished signal for end-to-end optimization. To augment…
After showing the efficiency of feedforward networks to estimate control in high dimension in the global optimization of some storages problems, we develop a modification of an algorithm based on some dynamic programming principle. We show…
This article introduces the concept of optimization learning, a methodology to design optimization proxies that learn the input/output mapping of parametric optimization problems. These optimization proxies are trustworthy by design: they…
We study reinforcement learning from human feedback in general Markov decision processes, where agents learn from trajectory-level preference comparisons. A central challenge in this setting is to design algorithms that select informative…
Large scale reinforcement learning has become a central tool for improving reasoning in large language models. At this scale, generation is often lagged or asynchronous, so updates are performed on data collected by older policies. This…
Recent advances in reinforcement learning (RL) have shown much promise across a variety of applications. However, issues such as scalability, explainability, and Markovian assumptions limit its applicability in certain domains. We observe…
Policy optimization methods with function approximation are widely used in multi-agent reinforcement learning. However, it remains elusive how to design such algorithms with statistical guarantees. Leveraging a multi-agent performance…
Training language models via reinforcement learning often relies on imperfect proxy rewards, since ground truth rewards that precisely define the intended behavior are rarely available. Standard metrics for assessing the quality of proxy…
Novel reinforcement learning algorithms, or improvements on existing ones, are commonly justified by evaluating their performance on benchmark environments and are compared to an ever-changing set of standard algorithms. However, despite…
Reinforcement learning~(RL) is a versatile framework for learning to solve complex real-world tasks. However, influences on the learning performance of RL algorithms are often poorly understood in practice. We discuss different analysis…
Assigning resources in business processes execution is a repetitive task that can be effectively automated. However, different automation methods may give varying results that may not be optimal. Proper resource allocation is crucial as it…
The analysis of Temporal Difference (TD) learning in the average-reward setting faces notable theoretical difficulties because the Bellman operator is not contractive with respect to any norm. This complicates standard analyses of…
This paper advocates privacy preserving requirements on collection of user data for recommender systems. The purpose of our study is twofold. First, we ask if restrictions on data collection will hurt test quality of RNN-based…
We consider challenging dynamic programming models where the associated Bellman equation, and the value and policy iteration algorithms commonly exhibit complex and even pathological behavior. Our analysis is based on the new notion of…
Regularized Markov Decision Processes serve as models of sequential decision making under uncertainty wherein the decision maker has limited information processing capacity and/or aversion to model ambiguity. With functional approximation,…