Related papers: Optimizing for the Future in Non-Stationary MDPs
Policy gradient methods in reinforcement learning update policy parameters by taking steps in the direction of an estimated gradient of policy value. In this paper, we consider the statistically efficient estimation of policy gradients from…
Long-term fairness is an important factor of consideration in designing and deploying learning-based decision systems in high-stake decision-making contexts. Recent work has proposed the use of Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) to formulate…
The online Markov decision process (MDP) is a generalization of the classical Markov decision process that incorporates changing reward functions. In this paper, we propose practical online MDP algorithms with policy iteration and…
In dynamic programming (DP) and reinforcement learning (RL), an agent learns to act optimally in terms of expected long-term return by sequentially interacting with its environment modeled by a Markov decision process (MDP). More generally…
This paper studies the performative policy learning problem, where agents adjust their features in response to a released policy to improve their potential outcomes, inducing an endogenous distribution shift. There has been growing interest…
Stochastic and soft optimal policies resulting from entropy-regularized Markov decision processes (ER-MDP) are desirable for exploration and imitation learning applications. Motivated by the fact that such policies are sensitive with…
Reactive synthesis algorithms allow automatic construction of policies to control an environment modeled as a Markov Decision Process (MDP) that are optimal with respect to high-level temporal logic specifications. However, they assume that…
A Markov decision process can be parameterized by a transition kernel and a reward function. Both play essential roles in the study of reinforcement learning as evidenced by their presence in the Bellman equations. In our inquiry of various…
In constrained Markov decision processes (CMDPs) with adversarial rewards and constraints, a well-known impossibility result prevents any algorithm from attaining both sublinear regret and sublinear constraint violation, when competing…
In this paper, we consider solving discounted Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) under the constraint that the resulting policy is stabilizing. In practice MDPs are solved based on some form of policy approximation. We will leverage recent…
We present a model-free reinforcement learning algorithm to find an optimal policy for a finite-horizon Markov decision process while guaranteeing a desired lower bound on the probability of satisfying a signal temporal logic (STL)…
We study a class of sequential decision-making problems with augmented predictions, potentially provided by a machine learning algorithm. In this setting, the decision-maker receives prediction intervals for unknown parameters that become…
We study the evaluation of a policy under best- and worst-case perturbations to a Markov decision process (MDP), using transition observations from the original MDP, whether they are generated under the same or a different policy. This is…
Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) have been used to formulate many decision-making problems in science and engineering. The objective is to synthesize the best decision (action selection) policies to maximize expected rewards (minimize…
Reinforcement learning is a framework for interactive decision-making with incentives sequentially revealed across time without a system dynamics model. Due to its scaling to continuous spaces, we focus on policy search where one…
Real-world reinforcement learning is often \emph{nonstationary}: rewards and dynamics drift, accelerate, oscillate, and trigger abrupt switches in the optimal action. Existing theory often represents nonstationarity with coarse-scale models…
Addressing uncertainty is critical for autonomous systems to robustly adapt to the real world. We formulate the problem of model uncertainty as a continuous Bayes-Adaptive Markov Decision Process (BAMDP), where an agent maintains a…
We study model-based reinforcement learning (RL) for episodic Markov decision processes (MDP) whose transition probability is parametrized by an unknown transition core with features of state and action. Despite much recent progress in…
Several real-world scenarios, such as remote control and sensing, are comprised of action and observation delays. The presence of delays degrades the performance of reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms, often to such an extent that…
This paper addresses the problem of model-free reinforcement learning for Robust Markov Decision Process (RMDP) with large state spaces. The goal of the RMDP framework is to find a policy that is robust against the parameter uncertainties…