Related papers: On the Convergence of the Monte Carlo Exploring St…
Policy gradient (PG) is a reinforcement learning (RL) approach that optimizes a parameterized policy model for an expected return using gradient ascent. While PG can work well even in non-Markovian environments, it may encounter plateaus or…
Providing densely shaped reward functions for RL algorithms is often exceedingly challenging, motivating the development of RL algorithms that can learn from easier-to-specify sparse reward functions. This sparsity poses new exploration…
The promise of reinforcement learning is to solve complex sequential decision problems autonomously by specifying a high-level reward function only. However, reinforcement learning algorithms struggle when, as is often the case, simple and…
Safe reinforcement learning (RL) aims to learn policies that satisfy certain constraints before deploying them to safety-critical applications. Previous primal-dual style approaches suffer from instability issues and lack optimality…
Decision-making under uncertainty (DMU) is present in many important problems. An open challenge is DMU in non-stationary environments, where the dynamics of the environment can change over time. Reinforcement Learning (RL), a popular…
Gradient-based methods are often used for policy optimization in deep reinforcement learning, despite being vulnerable to local optima and saddle points. Although gradient-free methods (e.g., genetic algorithms or evolution strategies) help…
Offline reinforcement learning (RL) methodologies enforce constraints on the policy to adhere closely to the behavior policy, thereby stabilizing value learning and mitigating the selection of out-of-distribution (OOD) actions during test…
Satisfying safety constraints almost surely (or with probability one) can be critical for the deployment of Reinforcement Learning (RL) in real-life applications. For example, plane landing and take-off should ideally occur with probability…
Symbolic regression aims to discover concise, interpretable mathematical expressions that satisfy desired objectives, such as fitting data, posing a highly combinatorial optimization problem. While genetic programming has been the dominant…
We present a Monte-Carlo simulation algorithm for real-time policy improvement of an adaptive controller. In the Monte-Carlo simulation, the long-term expected reward of each possible action is statistically measured, using the initial…
We propose Deterministic Sequencing of Exploration and Exploitation (DSEE) algorithm with interleaving exploration and exploitation epochs for model-based RL problems that aim to simultaneously learn the system model, i.e., a Markov…
Mathematical reasoning presents significant challenges for large language models (LLMs). To enhance their capabilities, we propose Monte Carlo Self-Refine Tree (MC-NEST), an extension of Monte Carlo Tree Search that integrates LLM-based…
Markov decision processes (MDPs) are used to model a wide variety of applications ranging from game playing over robotics to finance. Their optimal policy typically maximizes the expected sum of rewards given at each step of the decision…
A common setting of reinforcement learning (RL) is a Markov decision process (MDP) in which the environment is a stochastic discrete-time dynamical system. Whereas MDPs are suitable in such applications as video-games or puzzles, physical…
We consider the popular tree-based search strategy within the framework of reinforcement learning, the Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS), in the context of finite-horizon Markov decision process. We propose a dynamic sampling tree policy that…
Reinforcement learning (RL) is a powerful machine learning technique that enables an intelligent agent to learn an optimal policy that maximizes the cumulative rewards in sequential decision making. Most of methods in the existing…
In this paper, we provide a new algorithm for the problem of prediction in Reinforcement Learning, \emph{i.e.}, estimating the Value Function of a Markov Reward Process (MRP) using the linear function approximation architecture, with memory…
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…
We consider the Markov Decision Process (MDP) of selecting a subset of items at each step, termed the Select-MDP (S-MDP). The large state and action spaces of S-MDPs make them intractable to solve with typical reinforcement learning (RL)…
Recent advances in reinforcement learning (RL) enable its use on increasingly complex tasks, but the lack of formal safety guarantees still limits its application in safety-critical settings. A common practical approach is to augment the RL…