Related papers: A Theoretical Connection Between Statistical Physi…
The success of Reinforcement Learning (RL) heavily relies on the ability to learn robust representations from the observations of the environment. In most cases, the representations learned purely by the reinforcement learning loss can…
Inverse reinforcement learning aims to infer the reward function that explains expert behavior observed through trajectories of state--action pairs. A long-standing difficulty in classical IRL is the non-uniqueness of the recovered reward:…
We devise a control-theoretic reinforcement learning approach to support direct learning of the optimal policy. We establish various theoretical properties of our approach, such as convergence and optimality of our analog of the Bellman…
We extend the standard reinforcement learning framework to random time horizons. While the classical setting typically assumes finite and deterministic or infinite runtimes of trajectories, we argue that multiple real-world applications…
We propose an automata-theoretic approach for reinforcement learning (RL) under complex spatio-temporal constraints with time windows. The problem is formulated using a Markov decision process under a bounded temporal logic constraint.…
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…
Both the optimal value function and the optimal policy can be used to model an optimal controller based on the duality established by the Bellman equation. Even with this duality, no parametric model has been able to output both policy and…
Much research has been done to analyze the stock market. After all, if one can determine a pattern in the chaotic frenzy of transactions, then they could make a hefty profit from capitalizing on these insights. As such, the goal of our…
Deep reinforcement learning has demonstrated remarkable achievements across diverse domains such as video games, robotic control, autonomous driving, and drug discovery. Common methodologies in partially-observable domains largely lean on…
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…
Reinforcement learning in non-stationary environments is challenging due to abrupt and unpredictable changes in dynamics, often causing traditional algorithms to fail to converge. However, in many real-world cases, non-stationarity has some…
We introduce the framework of performative reinforcement learning where the policy chosen by the learner affects the underlying reward and transition dynamics of the environment. Following the recent literature on performative…
Learning a near optimal policy in a partially observable system remains an elusive challenge in contemporary reinforcement learning. In this work, we consider episodic reinforcement learning in a reward-mixing Markov decision process (MDP).…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) has demonstrated tremendous empirical success across numerous challenging domains. However, we lack a strong theoretical understanding of the statistical complexity of RL in environments with large state spaces,…
Under a Bayesian framework, we formulate the fully sequential sampling and selection decision in statistical ranking and selection as a stochastic control problem, and derive the associated Bellman equation. Using value function…
Commonly in reinforcement learning (RL), rewards are discounted over time using an exponential function to model time preference, thereby bounding the expected long-term reward. In contrast, in economics and psychology, it has been shown…
Modern reinforcement learning (RL) can be categorized into online and offline variants. As a pivotal aspect of both online and offline RL, current research on the Bellman equation revolves primarily around optimization techniques and…
The agent learns to organize decision behavior to achieve a behavioral goal, such as reward maximization, and reinforcement learning is often used for this optimization. Learning an optimal behavioral strategy is difficult under the…
We establish geometric and topological properties of the space of value functions in finite state-action Markov decision processes. Our main contribution is the characterization of the nature of its shape: a general polytope (Aigner et al.,…
Many AI problems, in robotics and other domains, are goal-based, essentially seeking trajectories leading to various goal states. Reinforcement learning (RL), building on Bellman's optimality equation, naturally optimizes for a single goal,…