Related papers: A Batch, Off-Policy, Actor-Critic Algorithm for Op…
Most prior approaches to offline reinforcement learning (RL) have taken an iterative actor-critic approach involving off-policy evaluation. In this paper we show that simply doing one step of constrained/regularized policy improvement using…
Offline policy optimization could have a large impact on many real-world decision-making problems, as online learning may be infeasible in many applications. Importance sampling and its variants are a commonly used type of estimator in…
Episodic memory lets reinforcement learning algorithms remember and exploit promising experience from the past to improve agent performance. Previous works on memory mechanisms show benefits of using episodic-based data structures for…
Personalized treatment decisions have become an integral part of modern medicine. Thereby, the aim is to make treatment decisions based on individual patient characteristics. Numerous methods have been developed for learning such policies…
We investigate the mechanism design problem faced by a principal who hires \emph{multiple} agents to gather and report costly information. Then, the principal exploits the information to make an informed decision. We model this problem as a…
Many practical applications of reinforcement learning constrain agents to learn from a fixed batch of data which has already been gathered, without offering further possibility for data collection. In this paper, we demonstrate that due to…
Actor-critic algorithms are widely used in reinforcement learning, but are challenging to mathematically analyse due to the online arrival of non-i.i.d. data samples. The distribution of the data samples dynamically changes as the model is…
Recently, robust reinforcement learning (RL) methods designed to handle adversarial input observations have received significant attention, motivated by RL's inherent vulnerabilities. While existing approaches have demonstrated reasonable…
Off-policy learning methods are intended to learn a policy from logged data, which includes context, action, and feedback (cost or reward) for each sample point. In this work, we build on the counterfactual risk minimization framework,…
Off-policy evaluation in reinforcement learning offers the chance of using observational data to improve future outcomes in domains such as healthcare and education, but safe deployment in high stakes settings requires ways of assessing its…
Learning from off-policy data is essential for sample-efficient reinforcement learning. In the present work, we build on the insight that the advantage function can be understood as the causal effect of an action on the return, and show…
We study the global convergence and global optimality of actor-critic, one of the most popular families of reinforcement learning algorithms. While most existing works on actor-critic employ bi-level or two-timescale updates, we focus on…
The average-reward formulation of reinforcement learning (RL) has drawn increased interest in recent years for its ability to solve temporally-extended problems without relying on discounting. Meanwhile, in the discounted setting,…
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…
Value-based algorithms are a cornerstone of off-policy reinforcement learning due to their simplicity and training stability. However, their use has traditionally been restricted to discrete action spaces, as they rely on estimating…
Recent advances in batch (offline) reinforcement learning have shown promising results in learning from available offline data and proved offline reinforcement learning to be an essential toolkit in learning control policies in a model-free…
Team competition in multi-agent Markov games is an increasingly important setting for multi-agent reinforcement learning, due to its general applicability in modeling many real-life situations. Multi-agent actor-critic methods are the most…
In multi-agent reinforcement learning, multiple agents learn simultaneously while interacting with a common environment and each other. Since the agents adapt their policies during learning, not only the behavior of a single agent becomes…
In reinforcement learning for partially observable environments, many successful algorithms have been developed within the asymmetric learning paradigm. This paradigm leverages additional state information available at training time for…
This paper augments the reward received by a reinforcement learning agent with potential functions in order to help the agent learn (possibly stochastic) optimal policies. We show that a potential-based reward shaping scheme is able to…