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We consider multiple parallel Markov decision processes (MDPs) coupled by global constraints, where the time varying objective and constraint functions can only be observed after the decision is made. Special attention is given to how well…
In this paper, we use concepts from supervisory control theory of discrete event systems to propose a method to learn optimal control policies for a finite-state Markov Decision Process (MDP) in which (only) certain sequences of actions are…
For a risk-averse finite-horizon Markov Decision Problem, we introduce a special class of Markov coherent risk measures, called mini-batch measures. We also define the class of multipattern risk-averse problems that generalizes the class of…
Many large-scale platforms and networked control systems have a centralized decision maker interacting with a massive population of agents under strict observability constraints. Motivated by such applications, we study a cooperative Markov…
Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), despite its popularity and empirical success, suffers from the curse of dimensionality. This paper builds the mathematical framework to approximate cooperative MARL by a mean-field control (MFC)…
An improvement of Q-learning is proposed in this paper. It is different from classic Q-learning in that the similarity between different states and actions is considered in the proposed method. During the training, a new updating mechanism…
The challenge of simulating random variables is a central problem in Statistics and Machine Learning. Given a tractable proposal distribution $P$, from which we can draw exact samples, and a target distribution $Q$ which is absolutely…
Machine learning models excel with abundant annotated data, but annotation is often costly and time-intensive. Active learning (AL) aims to improve the performance-to-annotation ratio by using query methods (QMs) to iteratively select the…
We consider offline reinforcement learning (RL) in $H$-horizon Markov decision processes (MDPs) under the linear $q^\pi$-realizability assumption, where the action-value function of every policy is linear with respect to a given…
We consider large-scale Markov decision processes (MDPs) with a risk measure of variability in cost, under the risk-aware MDPs paradigm. Previous studies showed that risk-aware MDPs, based on a minimax approach to handling risk, can be…
We study a new model-free algorithm to compute $\varepsilon$-optimal policies for average reward Markov decision processes, in the weakly communicating case. Given a generative model, our procedure combines a recursive sampling technique…
Learning and planning in partially-observable domains is one of the most difficult problems in reinforcement learning. Traditional methods consider these two problems as independent, resulting in a classical two-stage paradigm: first learn…
Full-sampling (e.g., Q-learning) and pure-expectation (e.g., Expected Sarsa) algorithms are efficient and frequently used techniques in reinforcement learning. Q$(\sigma,\lambda)$ is the first approach unifies them with eligibility trace…
Motivated by applications in reinforcement learning (RL), we study a nonlinear stochastic approximation (SA) algorithm under Markovian noise, and establish its finite-sample convergence bounds under various stepsizes. Specifically, we show…
The field of quickest change detection (QCD) focuses on the design and analysis of online algorithms that estimate the time at which a significant event occurs. In this paper, design and analysis are cast in a Bayesian framework, where QCD…
This work considers the sample and computational complexity of obtaining an $\epsilon$-optimal policy in a discounted Markov Decision Process (MDP), given only access to a generative model. In this work, we study the effectiveness of the…
Independent learning (IL), despite being a popular approach in practice to achieve scalability in large-scale multi-agent systems, usually lacks global convergence guarantees. In this paper, we study two representative algorithms,…
We present a general framework for applying machine-learning algorithms to the verification of Markov decision processes (MDPs). The primary goal of these techniques is to improve performance by avoiding an exhaustive exploration of the…
A central issue lying at the heart of online reinforcement learning (RL) is data efficiency. While a number of recent works achieved asymptotically minimal regret in online RL, the optimality of these results is only guaranteed in a…
We present BLINQ, a new model-based algorithm that learns the Whittle indices of an indexable, communicating and unichain Markov Decision Process (MDP). Our approach relies on building an empirical estimate of the MDP and then computing its…