Related papers: Loop Estimator for Discounted Values in Markov Rew…
Although Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms have found tremendous success in simulated domains, they often cannot directly be applied to physical systems, especially in cases where there are hard constraints to satisfy (e.g. on safety…
Linear Temporal Logic (LTL) is widely used to specify high-level objectives for system policies, and it is highly desirable for autonomous systems to learn the optimal policy with respect to such specifications. However, learning the…
We develop several new algorithms for learning Markov Decision Processes in an infinite-horizon average-reward setting with linear function approximation. Using the optimism principle and assuming that the MDP has a linear structure, we…
We consider an agent who is involved in a Markov decision process and receives a vector of outcomes every round. Her objective is to maximize a global concave reward function on the average vectorial outcome. The problem models applications…
We consider the problem of off-policy evaluation for reinforcement learning, where the goal is to estimate the expected reward of a target policy $\pi$ using offline data collected by running a logging policy $\mu$. Standard…
We consider episodic reinforcement learning in reward-mixing Markov decision processes (RMMDPs): at the beginning of every episode nature randomly picks a latent reward model among $M$ candidates and an agent interacts with the MDP…
We study algorithms using randomized value functions for exploration in reinforcement learning. This type of algorithms enjoys appealing empirical performance. We show that when we use 1) a single random seed in each episode, and 2) a…
We consider the problem of estimating the asymptotic variance of a function defined on a Markov chain, an important step for statistical inference of the stationary mean. We design a novel recursive estimator that requires $O(1)$…
Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) for Large Reasoning Models hinges on baseline estimation for variance reduction, but existing approaches pay a heavy price: PPO requires a policy-model scale critic, while GRPO needs…
Multi-task representation learning (MTRL) is an approach that learns shared latent representations across related tasks, facilitating collaborative learning that improves the overall learning efficiency. This paper studies MTRL for…
We study the constrained reinforcement learning problem, in which an agent aims to maximize the expected cumulative reward subject to a constraint on the expected total value of a utility function. In contrast to existing model-based…
Reward machines are automaton-like structures that capture the memory required to accomplish a multi-stage task. When combined with reinforcement learning or optimal control methods, they can be used to synthesize robot policies to achieve…
In this paper we consider the problem of learning an $\epsilon$-optimal policy for a discounted Markov Decision Process (MDP). Given an MDP with $S$ states, $A$ actions, the discount factor $\gamma \in (0,1)$, and an approximation threshold…
Given a Markov decision process (MDP), we seek to learn representations for a range of policies to facilitate behavior steering at test time. As policies of an MDP are uniquely determined by their occupancy measures, we propose modeling…
Off-policy evaluation (OPE) in reinforcement learning allows one to evaluate novel decision policies without needing to conduct exploration, which is often costly or otherwise infeasible. We consider for the first time the semiparametric…
Many real-world applications, such as those in medical domains, recommendation systems, etc, can be formulated as large state space reinforcement learning problems with only a small budget of the number of policy changes, i.e., low…
In order to distinguish policies that prescribe good from bad actions in transient states, we need to evaluate the so-called bias of a policy from transient states. However, we observe that most (if not all) works in approximate…
Variance plays a crucial role in risk-sensitive reinforcement learning, and most risk measures can be analyzed via variance. In this paper, we consider two law-invariant risks as examples: mean-variance risk and exponential utility risk.…
Designing sample-efficient and computationally feasible reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms is particularly challenging in environments with large or infinite state and action spaces. In this paper, we advance this effort by presenting…
Reinforcement learning (RL) for exponential-utility optimization in discounted Markov decision processes (MDPs) lacks principled value-based algorithms. We address this gap in the fixed risk-aversion setting. Building on the Bellman-type…