Related papers: Finite-Sample Analysis for SARSA with Linear Funct…
This paper studies satisfaction of temporal properties on unknown stochastic processes that have continuous state spaces. We show how reinforcement learning (RL) can be applied for computing policies that are finite-memory and deterministic…
Reinforcement learning, mathematically described by Markov Decision Problems, may be approached either through dynamic programming or policy search. Actor-critic algorithms combine the merits of both approaches by alternating between steps…
Policy gradient (PG) methods have played an essential role in the empirical successes of reinforcement learning. In order to handle large state-action spaces, PG methods are typically used with function approximation. In this setting, the…
Optimal stopping is the problem of determining when to stop a stochastic system in order to maximize reward, which is of practical importance in domains such as finance, operations management and healthcare. Existing methods for…
Greedy-GQ is an off-policy two timescale algorithm for optimal control in reinforcement learning. This paper develops the first finite-sample analysis for the Greedy-GQ algorithm with linear function approximation under Markovian noise. Our…
Stochastic approximation (SA) is an iterative algorithm for finding the fixed point of an operator using noisy samples and widely used in optimization and Reinforcement Learning (RL). The noise in RL exhibits a Markovian structure, and in…
Stochastic gradient descent type methods are ubiquitous in machine learning, but they are only applicable to the optimization of differentiable functions. Proximal algorithms are more general and applicable to nonsmooth functions. We…
Stochastic policies (also known as relaxed controls) are widely used in continuous-time reinforcement learning algorithms. However, executing a stochastic policy and evaluating its performance in a continuous-time environment remain open…
We study constrained nested stochastic optimization problems in which the objective function is a composition of two smooth functions whose exact values and derivatives are not available. We propose a single time-scale stochastic…
Continuous-time Markov decision processes are an important class of models in a wide range of applications, ranging from cyber-physical systems to synthetic biology. A central problem is how to devise a policy to control the system in order…
Recent theoretical work studies sample-efficient reinforcement learning (RL) extensively in two settings: learning interactively in the environment (online RL), or learning from an offline dataset (offline RL). However, existing algorithms…
Optimization problems with the objective function in the form of weighted sum and linear equality constraints are considered. Given that the number of local cost functions can be large as well as the number of constraints, a stochastic…
This paper is devoted to the convergence analysis of stochastic approximation algorithms of the form $\theta\_{n+1} = \theta\_n + \gamma\_{n+1} H\_{\theta\_n}(X\_{n+1})$ where $\{\theta\_nn, n \geq 0\}$ is a $R^d$-valued sequence,…
This work presents the first finite-time analysis for the last-iterate convergence of average-reward $Q$-learning with an asynchronous implementation. A key feature of the algorithm we study is the use of adaptive stepsizes, which serve as…
This paper presents a finite time convergence analysis for a decentralized stochastic approximation (SA) scheme. The scheme generalizes several algorithms for decentralized machine learning and multi-agent reinforcement learning. Our proof…
Sample average approximation (SAA) is a widely popular approach to data-driven decision-making under uncertainty. Under mild assumptions, SAA is both tractable and enjoys strong asymptotic performance guarantees. Similar guarantees,…
Although with progress in introducing auxiliary amortized inference models, learning discrete latent variable models is still challenging. In this paper, we show that the annoying difficulty of obtaining reliable stochastic gradients for…
Transfer learning techniques aim to leverage information from multiple related datasets to enhance prediction quality against a target dataset. Such methods have been adopted in the context of high-dimensional sparse regression, and some…
We study reinforcement learning with linear function approximation and finite-memory approximations for partially observed Markov decision processes (POMDPs). We first present an algorithm for the value evaluation of finite-memory feedback…
Large sample size brings the computation bottleneck for modern data analysis. Subsampling is one of efficient strategies to handle this problem. In previous studies, researchers make more fo- cus on subsampling with replacement (SSR) than…