Related papers: Multiple-Step Greedy Policies in Online and Approx…
While there is an extensive body of research analyzing policy gradient methods for discounted cumulative-reward MDPs, prior work on policy gradient methods for average-reward MDPs has been limited, with most existing results restricted to…
When using a tool, the grasps used for picking it up, reposing, and holding it in a suitable pose for the desired task could be distinct. Therefore, a key challenge for autonomous in-hand tool manipulation is finding a sequence of grasps…
Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), which is widely adopted by R1-like reasoning models, has advanced mathematical reasoning. Nevertheless, GRPO faces challenges in reward sparsity, verbosity, and inadequate focus on problem…
Models based on recursive adaptive partitioning such as decision trees and their ensembles are popular for high-dimensional regression as they can potentially avoid the curse of dimensionality. Because empirical risk minimization (ERM) is…
In this theoretical paper we are concerned with the problem of learning a value function by a smooth general function approximator, to solve a deterministic episodic control problem in a large continuous state space. It is shown that…
Monte Carlo Tree Search is a popular method for solving decision making problems. Faster implementations allow for more simulations within the same wall clock time, directly improving search performance. To this end, we present an…
Bayesian optimization is a sequential decision making framework for optimizing expensive-to-evaluate black-box functions. Computing a full lookahead policy amounts to solving a highly intractable stochastic dynamic program. Myopic…
Multi-turn interaction remains challenging for online reinforcement learning. A common solution is trajectory-level optimization, which treats each trajectory as a single training sample. However, this approach can be inefficient and yield…
Solving complex problems using reinforcement learning necessitates breaking down the problem into manageable tasks and learning policies to solve these tasks. These policies, in turn, have to be controlled by a master policy that takes…
We propose a policy improvement algorithm for Reinforcement Learning (RL) which is called Rerouted Behavior Improvement (RBI). RBI is designed to take into account the evaluation errors of the Q-function. Such errors are common in RL when…
Deep reinforcement learning policies, which are integral to modern control systems, represent valuable intellectual property. The development of these policies demands considerable resources, such as domain expertise, simulation fidelity,…
We show the potential of greedy recovery strategies for the sparse approximation of multivariate functions from a small dataset of pointwise evaluations by considering an extension of the orthogonal matching pursuit to the setting of…
Most reinforcement learning practitioners evaluate their policies with online Monte Carlo estimators for either hyperparameter tuning or testing different algorithmic design choices, where the policy is repeatedly executed in the…
Recent advances in reinforcement learning for foundation models, such as Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), have significantly improved the performance of foundation models on reasoning tasks. Notably, the advantage function serves…
Policy tree search is a family of tree search algorithms that use a policy to guide the search. These algorithms provide guarantees on the number of expansions required to solve a given problem that are based on the quality of the policy.…
We consider the problem of learning fair policies for multi-stage selection problems from observational data. This problem arises in several high-stakes domains such as company hiring, loan approval, or bail decisions where outcomes (e.g.,…
We study an approach to policy selection for large relational Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). We consider a variant of approximate policy iteration (API) that replaces the usual value-function learning step with a learning step in policy…
Competitive analysis of online algorithms has commonly been applied to understand the behaviour of real-time systems during overload conditions. While competitive analysis provides insight into the behaviour of certain algorithms, it is…
In the problem of active sequential hypothesis testing (ASHT), a learner seeks to identify the true hypothesis from among a known set of hypotheses. The learner is given a set of actions and knows the random distribution of the outcome of…
This paper introduces two novel modifications to the Dynamic sAmpling Policy Optimization (DAPO) algorithm [1], approached from a mixed-policy perspective. Standard policy gradient methods can suffer from instability and sample…