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Reinforcement learning studies how an agent should interact with an environment to maximize its cumulative reward. A standard way to study this question abstractly is to ask how many samples an agent needs from the environment to learn an…
Making optimal decisions under uncertainty is a shared problem among distinct fields. While optimal control is commonly studied in the framework of dynamic programming, it is approached with differing perspectives of the Bellman optimality…
Reinforcement learning (RL) typically defines a discount factor as part of the Markov Decision Process. The discount factor values future rewards by an exponential scheme that leads to theoretical convergence guarantees of the Bellman…
Among several tasks in Machine Learning, a specially important one is that of inferring the latent variables of a system and their causal relations with the observed behavior. Learning a Hidden Markov Model of given stochastic process is a…
We consider the problem of reinforcement learning (RL) with unbounded state space motivated by the classical problem of scheduling in a queueing network. Traditional policies as well as error metric that are designed for finite, bounded or…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) has emerged as an efficient method of choice for solving complex sequential decision making problems in automatic control, computer science, economics, and biology. In this paper we present a model-free RL…
The gloabal objective of inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) is to estimate the unknown cost function of some MDP base on observed trajectories generated by (approximate) optimal policies. The classical approach consists in tuning this…
Reinforcement learning methods typically use Deep Neural Networks to approximate the value functions and policies underlying a Markov Decision Process. Unfortunately, DNN-based RL suffers from a lack of explainability of the resulting…
Wasserstein policy gradient (WPG) is a policy optimization method for reinforcement learning (RL) that exploits the optimal-transport geometry of action distributions. For the entropy-regularized RL objective, WPG evolves each…
In the predict-then-optimize framework, the objective is to train a predictive model, mapping from environment features to parameters of an optimization problem, which maximizes decision quality when the optimization is subsequently solved.…
We introduce a novel class of algorithms to efficiently approximate the unknown return distributions in policy evaluation problems from distributional reinforcement learning (DRL). The proposed distributional dynamic programming algorithms…
Recently regular decision processes have been proposed as a well-behaved form of non-Markov decision process. Regular decision processes are characterised by a transition function and a reward function that depend on the whole history,…
The key assumption underlying linear Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) is that the learner has access to a known feature map $\phi(x, a)$ that maps state-action pairs to $d$-dimensional vectors, and that the rewards and transitions are…
Reinforcement learning has traditionally focused on learning state-dependent policies to solve optimal control problems in a closed-loop fashion. In this work, we introduce the paradigm of open-loop reinforcement learning where a fixed…
Off-policy Reinforcement Learning (RL) holds the promise of better data efficiency as it allows sample reuse and potentially enables safe interaction with the environment. Current off-policy policy gradient methods either suffer from high…
We consider policy evaluation in infinite-horizon discounted Markov decision problems (MDPs) with infinite spaces. We reformulate this task a compositional stochastic program with a function-valued decision variable that belongs to a…
To overcome the curses of dimensionality and modeling of Dynamic Programming (DP) methods to solve Markov Decision Process (MDP) problems, Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods are adopted in practice. Contrary to traditional RL algorithms…
We consider a reinforcement learning (RL) setting in which the agent interacts with a sequence of episodic MDPs. At the start of each episode the agent has access to some side-information or context that determines the dynamics of the MDP…
Reinforcement learning has long struggled with poor sample efficiency. One promising approach to mitigate this problem is leveraging group-invariant Markov Decision Processes ($G$-invariant MDPs). Existing works in this direction have…
Offline policy evaluation (OPE) is considered a fundamental and challenging problem in reinforcement learning (RL). This paper focuses on the value estimation of a target policy based on pre-collected data generated from a possibly…