Related papers: Optimistic Exploration even with a Pessimistic Ini…
Offline Reinforcement Learning (RL) faces distributional shift and unreliable value estimation, especially for out-of-distribution (OOD) actions. To address this, existing uncertainty-based methods penalize the value function with…
Offline reinforcement learning (RL), where the agent aims to learn the optimal policy based on the data collected by a behavior policy, has attracted increasing attention in recent years. While offline RL with linear function approximation…
Deep reinforcement learning agents frequently suffer from premature convergence, where early entropy collapse causes the policy to discard exploratory behaviors before discovering globally optimal strategies. We introduce Optimistic Policy…
Off-policy actor-critic algorithms have shown strong potential in deep reinforcement learning for continuous control tasks. Their success primarily comes from leveraging pessimistic state-action value function updates, which reduce function…
Offline Reinforcement Learning (ORL) enablesus to separately study the two interlinked processes of reinforcement learning: collecting informative experience and inferring optimal behaviour. The second step has been widely studied in the…
Model-based offline reinforcement learning (RL) aims to find highly rewarding policy, by leveraging a previously collected static dataset and a dynamics model. While the dynamics model learned through reuse of the static dataset, its…
Offline reinforcement learning requires reconciling two conflicting aims: learning a policy that improves over the behavior policy that collected the dataset, while at the same time minimizing the deviation from the behavior policy so as to…
Exhaustive enumeration of all possible join orders is often avoided, and most optimizers leverage heuristics to prune the search space. The design and implementation of heuristics are well-understood when the cost model is roughly linear,…
We study offline reinforcement learning (RL) in partially observable Markov decision processes. In particular, we aim to learn an optimal policy from a dataset collected by a behavior policy which possibly depends on the latent state. Such…
A precondition for the deployment of a Reinforcement Learning agent to a real-world system is to provide guarantees on the learning process. While a learning algorithm will eventually converge to a good policy, there are no guarantees on…
Empowerment, an information-theoretic measure of an agent's potential influence on its environment, has emerged as a powerful intrinsic motivation and exploration framework for reinforcement learning (RL). Besides for unsupervised RL and…
State-of-the-art reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms typically use random sampling (e.g., $\epsilon$-greedy) for exploration, but this method fails on hard exploration tasks like Montezuma's Revenge. To address the challenge of…
In this paper we propose a novel experimental design-based algorithm to minimize regret in online stochastic linear and combinatorial bandits. While existing literature tends to focus on optimism-based algorithms--which have been shown to…
Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms have made huge progress in recent years by leveraging the power of deep neural networks (DNN). Despite the success, deep RL algorithms are known to be sample inefficient, often requiring many rounds of…
Automated hyperparameter search in machine learning, especially for deep learning models, is typically formulated as a bilevel optimization problem, with hyperparameter values determined by the upper level and the model learning achieved by…
Optimistic Online Learning aims to exploit experts conveying reliable information to predict the future. However, such implicit optimism may be challenged when it comes to practical crafting of such experts. A fundamental example consists…
While policy-based reinforcement learning (RL) achieves tremendous successes in practice, it is significantly less understood in theory, especially compared with value-based RL. In particular, it remains elusive how to design a provably…
There is increasing interest in data-driven approaches for recommending optimal treatment strategies in many chronic disease management and critical care applications. Reinforcement learning methods are well-suited to this sequential…
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…
Change point estimation is often formulated as a search for the maximum of a gain function describing improved fits when segmenting the data. Searching through all candidates requires $O(n)$ evaluations of the gain function for an interval…