Related papers: Hierarchical Average Reward Policy Gradient Algori…
We propose a reinforcement learning (RL) framework for multi-objective decision-making, where the agent seeks to optimize a vector of rewards rather than a single scalar value. The objective is to ensure that the time-averaged reward vector…
Building systems that autonomously create temporal abstractions from data is a key challenge in scaling learning and planning in reinforcement learning. One popular approach for addressing this challenge is the options framework (Sutton et…
Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning (HRL) is a promising approach to solving long-horizon problems with sparse and delayed rewards. Many existing HRL algorithms either use pre-trained low-level skills that are unadaptable, or require…
Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning (HRL) approaches have shown successful results in solving a large variety of complex, structured, long-horizon problems. Nevertheless, a full theoretical understanding of this empirical evidence is…
Real-world tasks are often highly structured. Hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) has attracted research interest as an approach for leveraging the hierarchical structure of a given task in reinforcement learning (RL). However,…
We develop theory and algorithms for average-reward on-policy Reinforcement Learning (RL). We first consider bounding the difference of the long-term average reward for two policies. We show that previous work based on the discounted return…
As the operations of autonomous systems generally affect simultaneously several users, it is crucial that their designs account for fairness considerations. In contrast to standard (deep) reinforcement learning (RL), we investigate the…
Temporal abstraction allows reinforcement learning agents to represent knowledge and develop strategies over different temporal scales. The option-critic framework has been demonstrated to learn temporally extended actions, represented as…
The options framework is a popular approach for building temporally extended actions in reinforcement learning. In particular, the option-critic architecture provides general purpose policy gradient theorems for learning actions from…
We introduce a novel approach to hierarchical reinforcement learning for Linearly-solvable Markov Decision Processes (LMDPs) in the infinite-horizon average-reward setting. Unlike previous work, our approach allows learning low-level and…
Most of reinforcement learning algorithms optimize the discounted criterion which is beneficial to accelerate the convergence and reduce the variance of estimates. Although the discounted criterion is appropriate for certain tasks such as…
Hierarchical reinforcement learning (RL) can accelerate long-horizon decision-making by temporally abstracting a policy into multiple levels. Promising results in sparse reward environments have been seen with skills, i.e. sequences of…
Offline Reinforcement learning (RL) has shown potent in many safe-critical tasks in robotics where exploration is risky and expensive. However, it still struggles to acquire skills in temporally extended tasks. In this paper, we study the…
In reinforcement learning (RL), the goal is to obtain an optimal policy, for which the optimality criterion is fundamentally important. Two major optimality criteria are average and discounted rewards. While the latter is more popular, it…
To date, distributional reinforcement learning (distributional RL) methods have exclusively focused on the discounted setting, where an agent aims to optimize a discounted sum of rewards over time. In this work, we extend distributional RL…
Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms have been successfully applied to a range of challenging sequential decision making and control tasks. In this paper, we classify RL into direct and indirect RL according to how they seek the optimal…
We consider the batch (off-line) policy learning problem in the infinite horizon Markov Decision Process. Motivated by mobile health applications, we focus on learning a policy that maximizes the long-term average reward. We propose a…
Temporal abstraction is key to scaling up learning and planning in reinforcement learning. While planning with temporally extended actions is well understood, creating such abstractions autonomously from data has remained challenging. We…
We extend the options framework for temporal abstraction in reinforcement learning from discounted Markov decision processes (MDPs) to average-reward MDPs. Our contributions include general convergent off-policy inter-option learning…
Multi-objective Markov decision processes are sequential decision-making problems that involve multiple conflicting reward functions that cannot be optimized simultaneously without a compromise. This type of problems cannot be solved by a…