Related papers: The Value Function Polytope in Reinforcement Learn…
Markov reward processes (MRPs) are used to model stochastic phenomena arising in operations research, control engineering, robotics, and artificial intelligence, as well as communication and transportation networks. In many of these cases,…
Stateful policies play an important role in reinforcement learning, such as handling partially observable environments, enhancing robustness, or imposing an inductive bias directly into the policy structure. The conventional method for…
We present an iterative inverse reinforcement learning algorithm to infer optimal cost functions in continuous spaces. Based on a popular maximum entropy criteria, our approach iteratively finds a weight improvement step and proposes a…
Shaping has proven to be a powerful but precarious means of improving reinforcement learning performance. Ng, Harada, and Russell (1999) proposed the potential-based shaping algorithm for adding shaping rewards in a way that guarantees the…
In recent years, various powerful policy gradient algorithms have been proposed in deep reinforcement learning. While all these algorithms build on the Policy Gradient Theorem, the specific design choices differ significantly across…
The value function plays a crucial role as a measure for the cumulative future reward an agent receives in both reinforcement learning and optimal control. It is therefore of interest to study how similar the values of neighboring states…
We investigate a paradigm in multi-task reinforcement learning (MT-RL) in which an agent is placed in an environment and needs to learn to perform a series of tasks, within this space. Since the environment does not change, there is…
In reinforcement learning, the standard criterion to evaluate policies in a state is the expectation of (discounted) sum of rewards. However, this criterion may not always be suitable, we consider an alternative criterion based on the…
We propose a method to teach an automated agent to learn how to search for multi-hop paths of relations between entities in an open domain. The method learns a policy for directing existing information retrieval and machine reading…
We study off-policy reinforcement learning for controlling continuous-time Markov diffusion processes with discrete-time observations and actions. We consider model-free algorithms with function approximation that learn value and advantage…
In continuing tasks, average-reward reinforcement learning may be a more appropriate problem formulation than the more common discounted reward formulation. As usual, learning an optimal policy in this setting typically requires a large…
This paper presents a novel state representation for reward-free Markov decision processes. The idea is to learn, in a self-supervised manner, an embedding space where distances between pairs of embedded states correspond to the minimum…
A major challenge in reinforcement learning (RL) is the design of agents that are able to generalize across tasks that share common dynamics. A viable solution is meta-reinforcement learning, which identifies common structures among past…
The goal of reinforcement learning is estimating a policy that maps states to actions and maximizes the cumulative reward of a Markov Decision Process (MDP). This is oftentimes achieved by estimating first the optimal (reward) value…
Reinforcement learning (RL) enhances large language models (LLMs) in complex, long-chain-of-thought (long-CoT) reasoning. The advanced VAPO framework, despite sophisticated mechanisms like Decoupled GAE, theoretically faces fundamental…
We present a fully nonparametric method to estimate the value function, via simulation, in the context of expected infinite-horizon discounted rewards for Markov chains. Estimating such value functions plays an important role in approximate…
Many reinforcement-learning researchers treat the reward function as a part of the environment, meaning that the agent can only know the reward of a state if it encounters that state in a trial run. However, we argue that this is an…
We consider the reinforcement learning (RL) problem with general utilities which consists in maximizing a function of the state-action occupancy measure. Beyond the standard cumulative reward RL setting, this problem includes as particular…
To accumulate knowledge and improve its policy of behaviour, a reinforcement learning agent can learn `off-policy' about policies that differ from the policy used to generate its experience. This is important to learn counterfactuals, or…
Action-values play a central role in popular Reinforcement Learing (RL) models of behavior. Yet, the idea that action-values are explicitly represented has been extensively debated. Critics had therefore repeatedly suggested that…