Related papers: Reinforcement Learning to Rank in E-Commerce Searc…
Over the recent years, reinforcement learning (RL) starts to show promising results in tackling combinatorial optimization (CO) problems, in particular when coupled with curriculum learning to facilitate training. Despite emerging empirical…
Optimal decision making with limited or no information in stochastic environments where multiple agents interact is a challenging topic in the realm of artificial intelligence. Reinforcement learning (RL) is a popular approach for arriving…
Recent advances in reinforcement learning (RL) enable its use on increasingly complex tasks, but the lack of formal safety guarantees still limits its application in safety-critical settings. A common practical approach is to augment the RL…
Humans achieve efficient learning by relying on prior knowledge about the structure of naturally occurring tasks. There is considerable interest in designing reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms with similar properties. This includes…
This thesis develops theoretical frameworks and algorithms that advance constrained reinforcement learning (RL) across control, preference learning, and alignment of large language models. The first contribution addresses constrained Markov…
Ranking relevance is a fundamental task in search engines, aiming to identify the items most relevant to a given user query. Traditional relevance models typically produce scalar scores or directly predict relevance labels, limiting both…
The Robust Markov Decision Process (RMDP) framework focuses on designing control policies that are robust against the parameter uncertainties due to the mismatches between the simulator model and real-world settings. An RMDP problem is…
An in-depth understanding of the particular environment is crucial in reinforcement learning (RL). To address this challenge, the decision-making process of a mobile collaborative robotic assistant modeled by the Markov decision process…
Safe reinforcement learning has been a promising approach for optimizing the policy of an agent that operates in safety-critical applications. In this paper, we propose an algorithm, SNO-MDP, that explores and optimizes Markov decision…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) has the promise of providing data-driven support for decision-making in a wide range of problems in healthcare, education, business, and other domains. Classical RL methods focus on the mean of the total return…
In reinforcement learning (RL), different reward functions can define the same optimal policy but result in drastically different learning performance. For some, the agent gets stuck with a suboptimal behavior, and for others, it solves the…
Non-stationary domains, where unforeseen changes happen, present a challenge for agents to find an optimal policy for a sequential decision making problem. This work investigates a solution to this problem that combines Markov Decision…
Sample inefficiency is a long-lasting problem in reinforcement learning (RL). The state-of-the-art estimates the optimal action values while it usually involves an extensive search over the state-action space and unstable optimization.…
We introduce a new framework for web page ranking -- reinforcement ranking -- that improves the stability and accuracy of Page Rank while eliminating the need for computing the stationary distribution of random walks. Instead of relying on…
In the Bayesian Reinforcement Learning (BRL) setting, agents try to maximise the collected rewards while interacting with their environment while using some prior knowledge that is accessed beforehand. Many BRL algorithms have already been…
Reinforcement learning (RL) often necessitates a meticulous Markov Decision Process (MDP) design tailored to each task. This work aims to address this challenge by proposing a systematic approach to behavior synthesis and control for…
Reinforcement learning (RL) is a framework to optimize a control policy using rewards that are revealed by the system as a response to a control action. In its standard form, RL involves a single agent that uses its policy to accomplish a…
Reinforcement learning (RL) aims to estimate the action to take given a (time-varying) state, with the goal of maximizing a cumulative reward function. Predominantly, there are two families of algorithms to solve RL problems: value-based…
Learning-to-Rank (LTR) is a supervised machine learning approach that constructs models specifically designed to order a set of items or documents based on their relevance or importance to a given query or context. Despite significant…
In this paper, we focus on the problem of robustifying reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms with respect to model uncertainties. Indeed, in the framework of model-based RL, we propose to merge the theory of constrained Markov decision…