Related papers: Entropic Risk Constrained Soft-Robust Policy Optim…
In this paper, we discuss the deterministic policy gradient using the Actor-Critic methods based on the linear compatible advantage function approximator, where the input spaces are continuous. When the policy is restricted by hard…
Nonlinear control systems with partial information to the decision maker are prevalent in a variety of applications. As a step toward studying such nonlinear systems, this work explores reinforcement learning methods for finding the optimal…
We develop a framework for convexifying a fairly general class of optimization problems. Under additional assumptions, we analyze the suboptimality of the solution to the convexified problem relative to the original nonconvex problem and…
We present a novel extension to the family of Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) algorithms. We argue that based on the Maximum Entropy Principle, discrete SAC can be further improved via additional statistical constraints derived from a surrogate…
Risk-sensitive control balances performance with resilience to unlikely events in uncertain systems. This paper introduces ergodic-risk criteria, which capture long-term cumulative risks through probabilistic limit theorems. By ensuring the…
In risk-averse reinforcement learning (RL), the goal is to optimize some risk measure of the returns. A risk measure often focuses on the worst returns out of the agent's experience. As a result, standard methods for risk-averse RL often…
In recent years, deep off-policy actor-critic algorithms have become a dominant approach to reinforcement learning for continuous control. One of the primary drivers of this improved performance is the use of pessimistic value updates to…
Policy gradient methods are widely used for control in reinforcement learning, particularly for the continuous action setting. There have been a host of theoretically sound algorithms proposed for the on-policy setting, due to the existence…
Linear dynamical systems that obey stochastic differential equations are canonical models. While optimal control of known systems has a rich literature, the problem is technically hard under model uncertainty and there are hardly any…
In this paper we propose a novel gradient algorithm to learn a policy from an expert's observed behavior assuming that the expert behaves optimally with respect to some unknown reward function of a Markovian Decision Problem. The…
Mixture models are an expressive hypothesis class that can approximate a rich set of policies. However, using mixture policies in the Maximum Entropy (MaxEnt) framework is not straightforward. The entropy of a mixture model is not equal to…
Policy gradient is a generic and flexible reinforcement learning approach that generally enjoys simplicity in analysis, implementation, and deployment. In the last few decades, this approach has been extensively advanced for fully…
In this paper, we focus on the problem of robustifying reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms with respect to model uncertainties. Indeed, in the framework of model-based RL, we propose to merge the theory of constrained Markov decision…
In this paper, we present an online reinforcement learning algorithm for constrained Markov decision processes with a safety constraint. Despite the necessary attention of the scientific community, considering stochastic stopping time, the…
We pose an active perception problem where an autonomous agent actively interacts with a second agent with potentially adversarial behaviors. Given the uncertainty in the intent of the other agent, the objective is to collect further…
This paper concerns the problem of learning control policies for an unknown linear dynamical system to minimize a quadratic cost function. We present a method, based on convex optimization, that accomplishes this task robustly: i.e., we…
Managing risk in dynamic decision problems is of cardinal importance in many fields such as finance and process control. The most common approach to defining risk is through various variance related criteria such as the Sharpe Ratio or the…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) has shown exceptional performance across various applications, enabling autonomous agents to learn optimal policies through interaction with their environments. However, traditional RL frameworks often face…
The development of Distributional Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has introduced a natural way to incorporate risk sensitivity into value-based and actor-critic methods by employing risk measures other than expectation in the value function.…
Policy optimization is a core component of reinforcement learning (RL), and most existing RL methods directly optimize parameters of a policy based on maximizing the expected total reward, or its surrogate. Though often achieving…