Related papers: Geometry of Policy Improvement
In this paper, we tackle the challenging problem of delayed rewards in reinforcement learning (RL). While Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) has emerged as a leading Policy Gradient method, its performance can degrade under delayed rewards.…
Motivated by applications in online marketplaces such as ride-hailing platforms and payment channel networks, we study a single-server queue with state-dependent arrival control. The service operator dynamically chooses the arrival rate as…
The problem of making sequential decisions in unknown probabilistic environments is studied. In cycle $t$ action $y_t$ results in perception $x_t$ and reward $r_t$, where all quantities in general may depend on the complete history. The…
Policy gradient methods are an appealing approach in reinforcement learning because they directly optimize the cumulative reward and can straightforwardly be used with nonlinear function approximators such as neural networks. The two main…
State-of-the-art model-based reinforcement learning methods train policies on imagined rollouts. These rollouts are trajectories generated by a learned dynamics model and are scored by a learned reward model, but without querying the true…
Sampling-based motion planners have experienced much success due to their ability to efficiently and evenly explore the state space. However, for many tasks, it may be more efficient to not uniformly explore the state space, especially when…
Reinforcement Learning has drawn huge interest as a tool for solving optimal control problems. Solving a given problem (task or environment) involves converging towards an optimal policy. However, there might exist multiple optimal policies…
How do you incentivize self-interested agents to $\textit{explore}$ when they prefer to $\textit{exploit}$? We consider complex exploration problems, where each agent faces the same (but unknown) MDP. In contrast with traditional…
In this paper, we study the problem of optimal data collection for policy evaluation in linear bandits. In policy evaluation, we are given a target policy and asked to estimate the expected reward it will obtain when executed in a…
There is a consensus that human and non-human subjects experience temporal distortions in many stages of their perceptual and decision-making systems. Similarly, intertemporal choice research has shown that decision-makers undervalue future…
Our goal in this paper is to plan the motion of a robot in a partitioned environment with dynamically changing, locally sensed rewards. We assume that arbitrary assumptions on the reward dynamics can be given. The robot aims to accomplish a…
We present $\varepsilon$-retrain, an exploration strategy encouraging a behavioral preference while optimizing policies with monotonic improvement guarantees. To this end, we introduce an iterative procedure for collecting retrain areas --…
Consider discrete-time linear distributed averaging dynamics, whereby agents in a network start with uncorrelated and unbiased noisy measurements of a common underlying parameter (state of the world) and iteratively update their estimates…
In this paper we consider a real time queuing system with rewards and deadlines. We assume that packet processing time is known upon arrival, as is the case in communication networks. This assumption allows us to demonstrate that the well…
The problem of reinforcement learning is considered where the environment or the model undergoes a change. An algorithm is proposed that an agent can apply in such a problem to achieve the optimal long-time discounted reward. The algorithm…
Recent developments in sequential experimental design look to construct a policy that can efficiently navigate the design space, in a way that maximises the expected information gain. Whilst there is work on achieving tractable policies for…
In many sequential decision making tasks, it is challenging to design reward functions that help an RL agent efficiently learn behavior that is considered good by the agent designer. A number of different formulations of the reward-design…
Motivated by recommendation problems in music streaming platforms, we propose a nonstationary stochastic bandit model in which the expected reward of an arm depends on the number of rounds that have passed since the arm was last pulled.…
Models of economic decision makers often include idealized assumptions, such as rationality, perfect foresight, and access to all relevant pieces of information. These assumptions often assure the models' internal validity, but, at the same…
Given a Markov decision process (MDP), we seek to learn representations for a range of policies to facilitate behavior steering at test time. As policies of an MDP are uniquely determined by their occupancy measures, we propose modeling…