Related papers: On the function approximation error for risk-sensi…
There is growing importance to detecting faults and implementing the best methods in industrial and real-world systems. We are searching for the most trustworthy and practical data-based fault detection methods proposed by artificial…
Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) has become the predominant algorithm for on-policy reinforcement learning due to its scalability and empirical robustness across domains. However, there is a significant disconnect between the underlying…
In recent years deep neural networks have been successfully applied to the domains of reinforcement learning \cite{bengio2009learning,krizhevsky2012imagenet,hinton2006reducing}. Deep reinforcement learning \cite{mnih2015human} is reported…
An agent's ability to leverage past experience is critical for efficiently solving new tasks. Approximate solutions for new tasks can be obtained from previously derived value functions, as demonstrated by research on transfer learning,…
Any reinforcement learning algorithm that applies to all Markov decision processes (MDPs) will suffer $\Omega(\sqrt{SAT})$ regret on some MDP, where $T$ is the elapsed time and $S$ and $A$ are the cardinalities of the state and action…
We study the problem of deployment efficient reinforcement learning (RL) with linear function approximation under the \emph{reward-free} exploration setting. This is a well-motivated problem because deploying new policies is costly in…
We consider the problem of learning the optimal action-value function in the discounted-reward Markov decision processes (MDPs). We prove a new PAC bound on the sample-complexity of model-based value iteration algorithm in the presence of…
We consider an improper reinforcement learning setting where a learner is given $M$ base controllers for an unknown Markov decision process, and wishes to combine them optimally to produce a potentially new controller that can outperform…
Learning near-optimal behaviour from an expert's demonstrations typically relies on the assumption that the learner knows the features that the true reward function depends on. In this paper, we study the problem of learning from…
Policy evaluation in reinforcement learning is often conducted using two-timescale stochastic approximation, which results in various gradient temporal difference methods such as GTD(0), GTD2, and TDC. Here, we provide convergence rate…
This guide provides a reference for high-probability regret bounds in empirical risk minimization (ERM). The presentation is modular: we begin with intuition and general proof strategies, then state broadly applicable guarantees under…
We present an algorithm based on posterior sampling (aka Thompson sampling) that achieves near-optimal worst-case regret bounds when the underlying Markov Decision Process (MDP) is communicating with a finite, though unknown, diameter. Our…
This paper investigates the approximation properties of shallow neural networks with activation functions that are powers of exponential functions. It focuses on the dependence of the approximation rate on the dimension and the smoothness…
We present on-line policy gradient algorithms for computing the locally optimal policy of a constrained, average cost, finite state Markov Decision Process. The stochastic approximation algorithms require estimation of the gradient of the…
We present a reinforcement learning (RL) approach for robust optimisation of risk-aware performance criteria. To allow agents to express a wide variety of risk-reward profiles, we assess the value of a policy using rank dependent expected…
This work advances randomized exploration in reinforcement learning (RL) with function approximation modeled by linear mixture MDPs. We establish the first prior-dependent Bayesian regret bound for RL with function approximation; and refine…
We propose a policy improvement algorithm for Reinforcement Learning (RL) which is called Rerouted Behavior Improvement (RBI). RBI is designed to take into account the evaluation errors of the Q-function. Such errors are common in RL when…
We study the challenging exploration incentive problem in both bandit and reinforcement learning, where the rewards are scale-free and potentially unbounded, driven by real-world scenarios and differing from existing work. Past works in…
We propose and analyze a reinforcement learning principle that approximates the Bellman equations by enforcing their validity only along an user-defined space of test functions. Focusing on applications to model-free offline RL with…
Obtaining first-order regret bounds -- regret bounds scaling not as the worst-case but with some measure of the performance of the optimal policy on a given instance -- is a core question in sequential decision-making. While such bounds…