Related papers: Deep Reinforcement Learning in a Handful of Trials…

Applications of Reinforcement Learning (RL), in which agents learn to make a sequence of decisions despite lacking complete information about the latent states of the controlled system, that is, they act under partial observability of the…

Due to limited resources and public safety concerns, deep reinforcement learning (RL) agents for many cyber-physical systems (e.g., autonomous vehicles) are first trained in simulators. However, when deployed in real world environments,…

Bayesian reinforcement learning (RL) offers a principled and elegant approach for sequential decision making under uncertainty. Most notably, Bayesian agents do not face an exploration/exploitation dilemma, a major pathology of frequentist…

Meta-reinforcement learning (RL) addresses the problem of sample inefficiency in deep RL by using experience obtained in past tasks for a new task to be solved. However, most meta-RL methods require partially or fully on-policy data, i.e.,…

This paper studies the constrained/safe reinforcement learning (RL) problem with sparse indicator signals for constraint violations. We propose a model-based approach to enable RL agents to effectively explore the environment with unknown…

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…

Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms aim to learn optimal decisions in unknown environments through experience of taking actions and observing the rewards gained. In some cases, the environment is not influenced by the actions of the RL…

We propose a practical non-episodic PSRL algorithm that unlike recent state-of-the-art PSRL algorithms uses a deterministic, model-independent episode switching schedule. Our algorithm termed deterministic schedule PSRL (DS-PSRL) is…

The application of learning-based control methods in robotics presents significant challenges. One is that model-free reinforcement learning algorithms use observation data with low sample efficiency. To address this challenge, a prevalent…

Respondent-driven sampling (RDS) is widely used to study hidden or hard-to-reach populations by incentivizing study participants to recruit their social connections. The success and efficiency of RDS can depend critically on the nature of…

Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has demonstrated great potentials in solving sequential decision making problems in many applications. Despite its promising performance, practical gaps exist when deploying DRL in real-world scenarios. One…

Model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) has shown its advantages in sample-efficiency over model-free reinforcement learning (MFRL). Despite the impressive results it achieves, it still faces a trade-off between the ease of data…

Deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) is proven powerful for decision making in simulated environments. However, training deep RL model is challenging in real world applications such as production-scale health-care or recommender systems because…

Robotic shepherding problem considers the control and navigation of a group of coherent agents (e.g., a flock of bird or a fleet of drones) through the motion of an external robot, called shepherd. Machine learning based methods have…

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) enables policy learning from static data but often suffers from poor coverage of the state-action space and distributional shift problems. This problem can be addressed by allowing limited online…

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a powerful mathematical framework that allows robots to learn complex skills by trial-and-error. Despite numerous successes in many applications, RL algorithms still require thousands of trials to converge to…

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a classical tool to solve network control or policy optimization problems in unknown environments. The original Q-learning suffers from performance and complexity challenges across very large networks. Herein,…

Model ensemble is a useful approach in reinforcement learning (RL) for training effective agents. Despite wide success of RL, training effective agents remains difficult due to the multitude of factors requiring careful tuning, such as…

Most of the existing learning models, particularly deep neural networks, are reliant on large datasets whose hand-labeling is expensive and time demanding. A current trend is to make the learning of these models frugal and less dependent on…

Deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms have recently achieved remarkable successes in various sequential decision making tasks, leveraging advances in methods for training large deep networks. However, these methods usually require…