Related papers: A Cross Entropy based Stochastic Approximation Alg…
During initial iterations of training in most Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms, agents perform a significant number of random exploratory steps. In the real world, this can limit the practicality of these algorithms as it can lead to…
Deep Learning has become interestingly popular in computer vision, mostly attaining near or above human-level performance in various vision tasks. But recent work has also demonstrated that these deep neural networks are very vulnerable to…
In this paper, we present a brief survey of Reinforcement Learning (RL), with particular emphasis on Stochastic Approximation (SA) as a unifying theme. The scope of the paper includes Markov Reward Processes, Markov Decision Processes,…
Post-training large language models with reinforcement learning is bottlenecked by the reward signal. Existing approaches require either ground-truth verifiable rewards, restricting training to domains with automatic correctness checks…
We study the problem of reinforcement learning in infinite-horizon discounted linear Markov decision processes (MDPs), and propose the first computationally efficient algorithm achieving rate-optimal regret guarantees in this setting. Our…
We propose a model-free reinforcement learning algorithm inspired by the popular randomized least squares value iteration (RLSVI) algorithm as well as the optimism principle. Unlike existing upper-confidence-bound (UCB) based approaches,…
In this work, we introduce a stochastic maximum principle (SMP) approach for solving the reinforcement learning problem with the assumption that the unknowns in the environment can be parameterized based on physics knowledge. For the…
We study the problem of efficient exploration in order to learn an accurate model of an environment, modeled as a Markov decision process (MDP). Efficient exploration in this problem requires the agent to identify the regions in which…
Sequential decision making, commonly formalized as optimization of a Markov Decision Process, is a key challenge in artificial intelligence. Two successful approaches to MDP optimization are reinforcement learning and planning, which both…
We study reward-free reinforcement learning (RL) with linear function approximation, where the agent works in two phases: (1) in the exploration phase, the agent interacts with the environment but cannot access the reward; and (2) in the…
We study risk-sensitive RL where the goal is learn a history-dependent policy that optimizes some risk measure of cumulative rewards. We consider a family of risks called the optimized certainty equivalents (OCE), which captures important…
We study the cross-entropy method (CEM) for the non-convex optimization of a continuous and parameterized objective function and introduce a differentiable variant that enables us to differentiate the output of CEM with respect to the…
We study reinforcement learning methods with linear function approximation under non-Markov state and cost processes. We first consider the policy evaluation method and show that the algorithm converges under suitable ergodicity conditions…
This dissertation makes three main contributions. First, We identify a new connection between policy gradient and dynamic programming in MMDPs and propose the Coordinate Ascent Dynamic Programming (CADP) algorithm to compute a Markov policy…
The success of reinforcement learning in typical settings is predicated on Markovian assumptions on the reward signal by which an agent learns optimal policies. In recent years, the use of reward machines has relaxed this assumption by…
We propose a new reinforcement learning algorithm derived from a regularized linear-programming formulation of optimal control in MDPs. The method is closely related to the classic Relative Entropy Policy Search (REPS) algorithm of Peters…
This paper aims to establish an entropy-regularized value-based reinforcement learning method that can ensure the monotonic improvement of policies at each policy update. Unlike previously proposed lower-bounds on policy improvement in…
We propose the Linearly Adaptive Cross Entropy Loss function. This is a novel measure derived from the information theory. In comparison to the standard cross entropy loss function, the proposed one has an additional term that depends on…
We present a Reinforcement Learning (RL) solution to the view planning problem (VPP), which generates a sequence of view points that are capable of sensing all accessible area of a given object represented as a 3D model. In doing so, the…
This paper proposes a way to combine the Mesh Adaptive Direct Search (MADS) algorithm with the Cross-Entropy (CE) method for non smooth constrained optimization. The CE method is used as a Search step by the MADS algorithm. The result of…