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Reinforcement learning algorithms are generally designed to maximize the expected return across a population. However, a policy that is optimal on average may be suboptimal for certain individuals, leading to potential safety concerns. To…
Using Reinforcement Learning (RL) in simulation to construct policies useful in real life is challenging. This is often attributed to the sequential decision making aspect: inaccuracies in simulation accumulate over multiple steps, hence…
Statistical significance measures the reliability of a result obtained from a random experiment. We investigate the number of repetitions needed for a statistical result to have a certain significance. In the first step, we consider…
Algorithms are now routinely used to make consequential decisions that affect human lives. Examples include college admissions, medical interventions or law enforcement. While algorithms empower us to harness all information hidden in vast…
In this paper, we present a brief survey of Reinforcement Learning (RL), with particular emphasis on Stochastic Approximation (SA) as a unifying theme. The scope of the paper includes Markov Reward Processes, Markov Decision Processes,…
We study reinforcement learning (RL) problems in which agents observe the reward or transition realizations at their current state before deciding which action to take. Such observations are available in many applications, including…
The application of reinforcement learning (RL) to dynamic resource allocation in optical networks has been the focus of intense research activity in recent years, with almost 100 peer-reviewed papers. We present a review of progress in the…
Currently, reinforcement learning (RL), especially deep RL, has received more and more attention in the research area. However, the security of RL has been an obvious problem due to the attack manners becoming mature. In order to defend…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) problems are being considered under increasingly more complex structures. While tabular and linear models have been thoroughly explored, the analytical study of RL under nonlinear function approximation,…
Many traditional algorithms for solving combinatorial optimization problems involve using hand-crafted heuristics that sequentially construct a solution. Such heuristics are designed by domain experts and may often be suboptimal due to the…
In order for humans to confidently decide where to employ RL agents for real-world tasks, a human developer must validate that the agent will perform well at test-time. Some policy interpretability methods facilitate this by capturing the…
Function approximation has been an indispensable component in modern reinforcement learning algorithms designed to tackle problems with large state spaces in high dimensions. This paper reviews recent results on error analysis for these…
Fairness-aware learning aims at satisfying various fairness constraints in addition to the usual performance criteria via data-driven machine learning techniques. Most of the research in fairness-aware learning employs the setting of…
A new method based on the rejection sampling for finding statistical tests is proposed. This method is conceptually intuitive, easy to implement, and applicable for arbitrary dimension. To illustrate its potential applicability, three…
Standard reinforcement learning (RL) aims to find an optimal policy that identifies the best action for each state. However, in healthcare settings, many actions may be near-equivalent with respect to the reward (e.g., survival). We…
In this paper, we study distributional reinforcement learning from the perspective of statistical efficiency. We investigate distributional policy evaluation, aiming to estimate the complete return distribution (denoted $\eta^\pi$) attained…
Reinforcement learning (RL) commonly relies on scalar rewards with limited ability to express temporal, conditional, or safety-critical goals, and can lead to reward hacking. Temporal logic expressible via the more general class of…
The community of program optimisation and analysis, code performance evaluation, parallelisation and optimising compilation has published since many decades hundreds of research and engineering articles in major conferences and journals.…
Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has played a crucial role in the success of large models such as ChatGPT. RLHF is a reinforcement learning framework which combines human feedback to improve learning effectiveness and…
Assessment of replicability is critical to ensure the quality and rigor of scientific research. In this paper, we discuss inference and modeling principles for replicability assessment. Targeting distinct application scenarios, we propose…