Related papers: Cold-Start Reinforcement Learning with Softmax Pol…
Mobile robots are increasingly being employed for performing complex tasks in dynamic environments. Reinforcement learning (RL) methods are recognized to be promising for specifying such tasks in a relatively simple manner. However, the…
Reinforcement learning suffers from limitations in real practices primarily due to the number of required interactions with virtual environments. It results in a challenging problem because we are implausible to obtain a local optimal…
Soft Q-learning has emerged as a versatile model-free method for entropy-regularised reinforcement learning, optimising for returns augmented with a penalty on the divergence from a reference policy. Despite its success, the multi-step…
Safe reinforcement learning aims to learn a control policy while ensuring that neither the system nor the environment gets damaged during the learning process. For implementing safe reinforcement learning on highly nonlinear and…
Policy gradient methods are often applied to reinforcement learning in continuous multiagent games. These methods perform local search in the joint-action space, and as we show, they are susceptable to a game-theoretic pathology known as…
In this paper, we utilize results from convex analysis and monotone operator theory to derive additional properties of the softmax function that have not yet been covered in the existing literature. In particular, we show that the softmax…
We study the problem of sample efficient reinforcement learning, where prior data such as demonstrations are provided for initialization in lieu of a dense reward signal. A natural approach is to incorporate an imitation learning objective,…
Reinforcement learning often requires extensive training data. Simulation-to-real transfer offers a promising approach to address this challenge in robotics. While differentiable simulators offer improved sample efficiency through exact…
We propose policy gradient algorithms for solving a risk-sensitive reinforcement learning (RL) problem in on-policy as well as off-policy settings. We consider episodic Markov decision processes, and model the risk using the broad class of…
Many sequential decision-making problems that are currently automated, such as those in manufacturing or recommender systems, operate in an environment where there is either little uncertainty, or zero risk of catastrophe. As companies and…
Serverless computing has gained a strong traction in the cloud computing community in recent years. Among the many benefits of this novel computing model, the rapid auto-scaling capability of user applications takes prominence. However, the…
This paper prescribes a suite of techniques for off-policy Reinforcement Learning (RL) that simplify the training process and reduce the sample complexity. First, we show that simple Deterministic Policy Gradient works remarkably well as…
Robust Reinforcement Learning aims to derive optimal behavior that accounts for model uncertainty in dynamical systems. However, previous studies have shown that by considering the worst case scenario, robust policies can be overly…
A significant portion of recent research on Large Language Model (LLM) alignment focuses on developing new policy optimization methods based on Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). Two prominent directions have emerged: (i) a shift…
Deep neural networks coupled with fast simulation and improved computation have led to recent successes in the field of reinforcement learning (RL). However, most current RL-based approaches fail to generalize since: (a) the gap between…
A reinforcement learning agent that needs to pursue different goals across episodes requires a goal-conditional policy. In addition to their potential to generalize desirable behavior to unseen goals, such policies may also enable…
The potential benefits of model-free reinforcement learning to real robotics systems are limited by its uninformed exploration that leads to slow convergence, lack of data-efficiency, and unnecessary interactions with the environment. To…
Continual learning requires the model to maintain the learned knowledge while learning from a non-i.i.d data stream continually. Due to the single-pass training setting, online continual learning is very challenging, but it is closer to the…
Inverse reinforcement learning methods aim to retrieve the reward function of a Markov decision process based on a dataset of expert demonstrations. The commonplace scarcity and heterogeneous sources of such demonstrations can lead to the…
Cold-start challenges in recommender systems necessitate leveraging auxiliary features beyond user-item interactions. However, the presence of irrelevant or noisy features can degrade predictive performance, whereas an excessive number of…