Related papers: Classical Policy Gradient: Preserving Bellman's Pr…
We analyze combinatorial optimization problems with ordinal, i.e., non-additive, objective functions that assign categories (like good, medium and bad) rather than cost coefficients to the elements of feasible solutions. We review different…
In this paper we consider a control problem for a Partially Observable Piecewise Deterministic Markov Process of the following type: After the jump of the process the controller receives a noisy signal about the state and the aim is to…
Standard Markov decision process (MDP) and reinforcement learning algorithms optimize the policy with respect to the expected gain. We propose an algorithm which enables to optimize an alternative objective: the probability that the gain is…
Off-policy stochastic actor-critic methods rely on approximating the stochastic policy gradient in order to derive an optimal policy. One may also derive the optimal policy by approximating the action-value gradient. The use of action-value…
We develop several new algorithms for learning Markov Decision Processes in an infinite-horizon average-reward setting with linear function approximation. Using the optimism principle and assuming that the MDP has a linear structure, we…
This work revisits standard policy gradient methods used on restricted policy classes, which are known to get stuck in suboptimal critical points. We identify an important cause for this phenomenon to be that the policy gradient is itself…
We consider the problem of planning with participation constraints introduced in [Zhang et al., 2022]. In this problem, a principal chooses actions in a Markov decision process, resulting in separate utilities for the principal and the…
In this paper, we are interested in optimal decisions in a partially observable Markov universe. Our viewpoint departs from the dynamic programming viewpoint: we are directly approximating an optimal strategic tree depending on the…
We introduce Kalman Gradient Descent, a stochastic optimization algorithm that uses Kalman filtering to adaptively reduce gradient variance in stochastic gradient descent by filtering the gradient estimates. We present both a theoretical…
This note provides upper bounds on the number of operations required to compute by value iterations a nearly optimal policy for an infinite-horizon discounted Markov decision process with a finite number of states and actions. For a given…
This paper investigates a category of constrained fractional optimization problems that emerge in various practical applications. The objective function for this category is characterized by the ratio of a numerator and denominator, both…
In this paper, a convex optimization-based method is proposed for numerically solving dynamic programs in continuous state and action spaces. The key idea is to approximate the output of the Bellman operator at a particular state by the…
In this work, multi-variable derivative-free optimization algorithms for unconstrained optimization problems are developed. A novel procedure for approximating the gradient of multi-variable objective functions based on non-commutative maps…
We consider dynamic programming problems with finite, discrete-time horizons and prohibitively high-dimensional, discrete state-spaces for direct computation of the value function from the Bellman equation. For the case that the value…
We focus on the optimization problem with smooth, possibly nonconvex objectives and a convex constraint set for which the Euclidean projection operation is practically available. Focusing on this setting, we carry out a general convergence…
We introduce a new algorithm for multi-objective reinforcement learning (MORL) with linear preferences, with the goal of enabling few-shot adaptation to new tasks. In MORL, the aim is to learn policies over multiple competing objectives…
In this paper we give a new approach to introduce switching strategies in a special class of optimal multiprocesses. Defined as the set of partitions of the time interval, switching strategies become the character of a classical control.…
We consider the problem of finding the best memoryless stochastic policy for an infinite-horizon partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP) with finite state and action spaces with respect to either the discounted or mean reward…
We propose policy gradient algorithms for solving a risk-sensitive reinforcement learning (RL) problem in on-policy as well as off-policy settings. We consider episodic Markov decision processes, and model the risk using the broad class of…
The objective of this work is to study continuous-time Markov decision processes on a general Borel state space with both impulsive and continuous controls for the infinite-time horizon discounted cost. The continuous-time controlled…