Related papers: Geometry of Policy Improvement
We study the reward-free reinforcement learning framework, which is particularly suitable for batch reinforcement learning and scenarios where one needs policies for multiple reward functions. This framework has two phases. In the…
We study a decision-maker's problem of finding optimal monetary incentive schemes for retention when faced with agents whose participation decisions (stochastically) depend on the incentive they receive. Our focus is on policies constrained…
The planning domain has experienced increased interest in the formal synthesis of decision-making policies. This formal synthesis typically entails finding a policy which satisfies formal specifications in the form of some well-defined…
Decentralized policies for information gathering are required when multiple autonomous agents are deployed to collect data about a phenomenon of interest without the ability to communicate. Decentralized partially observable Markov decision…
The input to the stochastic orienteering problem consists of a budget $B$ and metric $(V,d)$ where each vertex $v$ has a job with deterministic reward and random processing time (drawn from a known distribution). The processing times are…
Transfer learning of prediction models has been extensively studied, while the corresponding policy learning approaches are rarely discussed. In this paper, we propose principled approaches for learning the optimal policy in the target…
We study the problem of learning exploration-exploitation strategies that effectively adapt to dynamic environments, where the task may change over time. While RNN-based policies could in principle represent such strategies, in practice…
Reinforcement learning for embodied agents is a challenging problem. The accumulated reward to be optimized is often a very rugged function, and gradient methods are impaired by many local optimizers. We demonstrate, in an experimental…
In this paper, we study a few challenging theoretical and numerical issues on the well known trust region policy optimization for deep reinforcement learning. The goal is to find a policy that maximizes the total expected reward when the…
We consider Incentive Decision Processes, where a principal seeks to reduce its costs due to another agent's behavior, by offering incentives to the agent for alternate behavior. We focus on the case where a principal interacts with a…
This paper studies policy learning for continuous treatments from observational data. Continuous treatments present more significant challenges than discrete ones because population welfare may need nonparametric estimation, and policy…
We consider a regulator willing to drive individual choices towards increasing social welfare by providing incentives to a large population of individuals. For that purpose, we formalize and solve the problem of finding an optimal…
Methods for learning optimal policies in autonomous agents often assume that the way the domain is conceptualised---its possible states and actions and their causal structure---is known in advance and does not change during learning. This…
Reinforcement Learning, a machine learning framework for training an autonomous agent based on rewards, has shown outstanding results in various domains. However, it is known that learning a good policy is difficult in a domain where…
Test-time data augmentation$-$averaging the predictions of a machine learning model across multiple augmented samples of data$-$is a widely used technique that improves the predictive performance. While many advanced learnable data…
This paper studies the performative policy learning problem, where agents adjust their features in response to a released policy to improve their potential outcomes, inducing an endogenous distribution shift. There has been growing interest…
We consider a sequential decision-making problem where an agent can take one action at a time and each action has a stochastic temporal extent, i.e., a new action cannot be taken until the previous one is finished. Upon completion, the…
Human preferences are not always represented via complete linear orders: It is natural to employ partially-ordered preferences for expressing incomparable outcomes. In this work, we consider decision-making and probabilistic planning in…
Reinforcement learning is commonly concerned with problems of maximizing accumulated rewards in Markov decision processes. Oftentimes, a certain goal state or a subset of the state space attain maximal reward. In such a case, the…
We introduce a stochastic principal-agent model. A principal and an agent interact in a stochastic environment, each privy to observations about the state not available to the other. The principal has the power of commitment, both to elicit…