Related papers: Data-Efficient Policy Evaluation Through Behavior …
This paper studies the problem of data collection for policy evaluation in Markov decision processes (MDPs). In policy evaluation, we are given a target policy and asked to estimate the expected cumulative reward it will obtain in an…
This paper investigates the optimization problem of an infinite stage discrete time Markov decision process (MDP) with a long-run average metric considering both mean and variance of rewards together. Such performance metric is important…
Policy evaluation estimates the performance of a policy by (1) collecting data from the environment and (2) processing raw data into a meaningful estimate. Due to the sequential nature of reinforcement learning, any improper data-collecting…
We introduce the active exploration problem in Markov decision processes (MDPs). Each state of the MDP is characterized by a random value and the learner should gather samples to estimate the mean value of each state as accurately as…
Addressing uncertainty is critical for autonomous systems to robustly adapt to the real world. We formulate the problem of model uncertainty as a continuous Bayes-Adaptive Markov Decision Process (BAMDP), where an agent maintains a…
Markov decision processes (MDPs) is viewed as an optimization of an objective function over certain linear operators over general function spaces. A new existence result is established for the existence of optimal policies in general MDPs,…
In this paper, we study a mean-variance optimization problem in an infinite horizon discrete time discounted Markov decision process (MDP). The objective is to minimize the variance of system rewards with the constraint of mean performance.…
Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) have been used to formulate many decision-making problems in science and engineering. The objective is to synthesize the best decision (action selection) policies to maximize expected rewards (or minimize…
Markov decision processes (MDPs) are widely used in modeling decision making problems in stochastic environments. However, precise specification of the reward functions in MDPs is often very difficult. Recent approaches have focused on…
Markov decision processes (MDPs) are standard models for probabilistic systems with non-deterministic behaviours. Mean payoff (or long-run average reward) provides a mathematically elegant formalism to express performance related…
Guided policy search algorithms have been proven to work with incredible accuracy for not only controlling a complicated dynamical system, but also learning optimal policies from various unseen instances. One assumes true nature of the…
We study the problem of off-policy policy optimization in Markov decision processes, and develop a novel off-policy policy gradient method. Prior off-policy policy gradient approaches have generally ignored the mismatch between the…
We revisit the identification of an $\varepsilon$-optimal policy in average-reward Markov Decision Processes (MDP). In such MDPs, two measures of complexity have appeared in the literature: the diameter, $D$, and the optimal bias span, $H$,…
Markov decision processes (MDPs) are the defacto frame-work for sequential decision making in the presence ofstochastic uncertainty. A classical optimization criterion forMDPs is to maximize the expected discounted-sum pay-off, which…
When humans are given a policy to execute, there can be policy execution errors and deviations in policy if there is uncertainty in identifying a state. This can happen due to the human agent's cognitive limitations and/or perceptual…
Reinforcement learning in environments with many action-state pairs is challenging. At issue is the number of episodes needed to thoroughly search the policy space. Most conventional heuristics address this search problem in a stochastic…
We cast episodic Markov decision process (MDP) planning as Bayesian inference over policies. A policy is treated as the latent variable and is assigned an unnormalized probability of optimality that is monotone in its expected return,…
The most data-efficient algorithms for reinforcement learning in robotics are model-based policy search algorithms, which alternate between learning a dynamical model of the robot and optimizing a policy to maximize the expected return…
We consider the problem of controlling a Markov decision process (MDP) with a large state space, so as to minimize average cost. Since it is intractable to compete with the optimal policy for large scale problems, we pursue the more modest…
Markov decision processes (MDPs) are used to model a wide variety of applications ranging from game playing over robotics to finance. Their optimal policy typically maximizes the expected sum of rewards given at each step of the decision…