Related papers: Particle Value Functions
Importance sampling is a central idea underlying off-policy prediction in reinforcement learning. It provides a strategy for re-weighting samples from a distribution to obtain unbiased estimates under another distribution. However,…
We introduce a novel framework to account for sensitivity to rewards uncertainty in sequential decision-making problems. While risk-sensitive formulations for Markov decision processes studied so far focus on the distribution of the…
The potential of reinforcement learning (RL) to deliver aligned and performant agents is partially bottlenecked by the reward engineering problem. One alternative to heuristic trial-and-error is preference-based RL (PbRL), where a reward…
It is well known that reinforcement learning can be cast as inference in an appropriate probabilistic model. However, this commonly involves introducing a distribution over agent trajectories with probabilities proportional to exponentiated…
Offline reinforcement learning, wherein one uses off-policy data logged by a fixed behavior policy to evaluate and learn new policies, is crucial in applications where experimentation is limited such as medicine. We study the estimation of…
Markov reward processes (MRPs) are used to model stochastic phenomena arising in operations research, control engineering, robotics, and artificial intelligence, as well as communication and transportation networks. In many of these cases,…
Recent work in AI safety has highlighted that in sequential decision making, objectives are often underspecified or incomplete. This gives discretion to the acting agent to realize the stated objective in ways that may result in undesirable…
Policy gradient methods are widely adopted reinforcement learning algorithms for tasks with continuous action spaces. These methods succeeded in many application domains, however, because of their notorious sample inefficiency their use…
Obtaining a survival strategy (policy) is one of the fundamental problems of biological agents. In this paper, we generalize the formulation of previous research related to the survival of an agent and we formulate the survival problem as a…
This paper presents a novel form of policy gradient for model-free reinforcement learning (RL) with improved exploration properties. Current policy-based methods use entropy regularization to encourage undirected exploration of the reward…
The objective of a reinforcement learning agent is to behave so as to maximise the sum of a suitable scalar function of state: the reward. These rewards are typically given and immutable. In this paper, we instead consider the proposition…
In the physical world, people have dynamic preferences, e.g., the same situation can lead to satisfaction for some humans and to frustration for others. Personalization is called for. The same observation holds for online behavior with…
Agents' learning from feedback shapes economic outcomes, and many economic decision-makers today employ learning algorithms to make consequential choices. This note shows that a widely used learning algorithm, $\varepsilon$-Greedy, exhibits…
Learning a reward function from human preferences is challenging as it typically requires having a high-fidelity simulator or using expensive and potentially unsafe actual physical rollouts in the environment. However, in many tasks the…
We study reinforcement learning for controlled diffusion processes with unbounded continuous state spaces, bounded continuous actions, and polynomially growing rewards: settings that arise naturally in finance, economics, and operations…
We consider the problem of learning models for risk-sensitive reinforcement learning. We theoretically demonstrate that proper value equivalence, a method of learning models which can be used to plan optimally in the risk-neutral setting,…
We consider a discrete-time dividend payout problem with risk sensitive shareholders. It is assumed that they are equipped with a risk aversion coefficient and construct their discounted payoff with the help of the exponential premium…
Policy gradient methods are very attractive in reinforcement learning due to their model-free nature and convergence guarantees. These methods, however, suffer from high variance in gradient estimation, resulting in poor sample efficiency.…
Reinforcement-learning agents seek to maximize a reward signal through environmental interactions. As humans, our job in the learning process is to design reward functions to express desired behavior and enable the agent to learn such…
This paper introduces a rule for policy selection in the presence of estimation uncertainty, explicitly accounting for estimation risk. The rule belongs to the class of risk-aware rules on the efficient decision frontier, characterized as…