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Policy optimization methods are popular reinforcement learning algorithms, because their incremental and on-policy nature makes them more stable than the value-based counterparts. However, the same properties also make them slow to converge…
We propose a formulation of the stochastic cutting stock problem as a discounted infinite-horizon Markov decision process. At each decision epoch, given current inventory of items, an agent chooses in which patterns to cut objects in stock…
Conditional Value at Risk (CVaR) is widely used to account for the preferences of a risk-averse agent in the extreme loss scenarios. To study the effectiveness of randomization in interdiction games with an interdictor that is both risk and…
Whereas classical Markov decision processes maximize the expected reward, we consider minimizing the risk. We propose to evaluate the risk associated to a given policy over a long-enough time horizon with the help of a central limit…
Reinforcement learning can provide effective reasoning for sequential decision-making problems with variable dynamics. Such reasoning in practical implementation, however, poses a persistent challenge in interpreting the reward function and…
We consider the problem of learning by demonstration from agents acting in unknown stochastic Markov environments or games. Our aim is to estimate agent preferences in order to construct improved policies for the same task that the agents…
We consider the problem of learning by demonstration from agents acting in unknown stochastic Markov environments or games. Our aim is to estimate agent preferences in order to construct improved policies for the same task that the agents…
Several authors have recently developed risk-sensitive policy gradient methods that augment the standard expected cost minimization problem with a measure of variability in cost. These studies have focused on specific risk-measures, such as…
We study episodic reinforcement learning (RL) in non-stationary linear kernel Markov decision processes (MDPs). In this setting, both the reward function and the transition kernel are linear with respect to the given feature maps and are…
Reinforcement learning algorithms utilizing policy gradients (PG) to optimize Conditional Value at Risk (CVaR) face significant challenges with sample inefficiency, hindering their practical applications. This inefficiency stems from two…
Consider a Markov decision process (MDP) that admits a set of state-action features, which can linearly express the process's probabilistic transition model. We propose a parametric Q-learning algorithm that finds an approximate-optimal…
The success of reinforcement learning in typical settings is predicated on Markovian assumptions on the reward signal by which an agent learns optimal policies. In recent years, the use of reward machines has relaxed this assumption by…
Model-based reinforcement learning has the potential to be more sample efficient than model-free approaches. However, existing model-based methods are vulnerable to model bias, which leads to poor generalization and asymptotic performance…
Value-at-Risk (VaR) and Conditional Value-at-Risk (CVaR) are popular risk measures from academic, industrial and regulatory perspectives. The problem of minimizing CVaR is theoretically known to be of Neyman-Pearson type binary solution. We…
Many reinforcement learning algorithms, particularly those that rely on return estimates for policy improvement, can suffer from poor sample efficiency and training instability due to high-variance return estimates. In this paper we…
Coordination among connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs) is advancing due to developments in control and communication technologies. However, much of the current work is based on oversimplified and unrealistic task-specific assumptions,…
The ability to make optimal decisions under uncertainty remains important across a variety of disciplines from portfolio management to power engineering. This generally implies applying some safety margins on uncertain parameters that may…
Learning to make decisions from observed data in dynamic environments remains a problem of fundamental importance in a number of fields, from artificial intelligence and robotics, to medicine and finance. This paper concerns the problem of…
We consider risk-averse learning in repeated unknown games where the goal of the agents is to minimize their individual risk of incurring significantly high cost. Specifically, the agents use the conditional value at risk (CVaR) as a risk…
Invariant Causal Prediction (Peters et al., 2016) is a technique for out-of-distribution generalization which assumes that some aspects of the data distribution vary across the training set but that the underlying causal mechanisms remain…