Related papers: Policy Gradient Optimization of Thompson Sampling …
Genetic algorithms have been widely used in many practical optimization problems. Inspired by natural selection, operators, including mutation, crossover and selection, provide effective heuristics for search and black-box optimization.…
Thompson sampling (TS) has optimal regret and excellent empirical performance in multi-armed bandit problems. Yet, in Bayesian optimization, TS underperforms popular acquisition functions (e.g., EI, UCB). TS samples arms according to the…
We study Thompson Sampling algorithms for stochastic multi-armed bandits in the batched setting, in which we want to minimize the regret over a sequence of arm pulls using a small number of policy changes (or, batches). We propose two…
In the stochastic multi-armed bandit problem, a randomized probability matching policy called Thompson sampling (TS) has shown excellent performance in various reward models. In addition to the empirical performance, TS has been shown to…
Thompson Sampling has generated significant interest due to its better empirical performance than upper confidence bound based algorithms. In this paper, we study Thompson Sampling based algorithm for Unsupervised Sequential Selection (USS)…
We consider the multiarm bandit problems in the timevarying dynamic system for rich structural features. For the nonlinear dynamic model, we propose the approximate inference for the posterior distributions based on Laplace Approximation.…
This paper develops the first policy gradient method with global optimality guarantee and complexity analysis for robust reinforcement learning under model mismatch. Robust reinforcement learning is to learn a policy robust to model…
Reinforcement learning policies are often represented by neural networks, but programmatic policies are preferred in some cases because they are more interpretable, amenable to formal verification, or generalize better. While efficient…
Policy gradient (PG) estimation becomes a challenge when we are not allowed to sample with the target policy but only have access to a dataset generated by some unknown behavior policy. Conventional methods for off-policy PG estimation…
Policy gradient methods have had great success in solving continuous control tasks, yet the stochastic nature of such problems makes deterministic value estimation difficult. We propose an approach which instead estimates a distribution by…
This work revisits standard policy gradient methods used on restricted policy classes, which are known to get stuck in suboptimal critical points. We identify an important cause for this phenomenon to be that the policy gradient is itself…
Designing efficient exploration is central to Reinforcement Learning due to the fundamental problem posed by the exploration-exploitation dilemma. Bayesian exploration strategies like Thompson Sampling resolve this trade-off in a principled…
Originally motivated by default risk management applications, this paper investigates a novel problem, referred to as the profitable bandit problem here. At each step, an agent chooses a subset of the K possible actions. For each action…
We consider policy gradient methods for stochastic optimal control problem in continuous time. In particular, we analyze the gradient flow for the control, viewed as a continuous time limit of the policy gradient method. We prove the global…
We systematically develop a learning-based treatment of stochastic optimal control (SOC), relying on direct optimization of parametric control policies. We propose a derivation of adjoint sensitivity results for stochastic differential…
We derive a stochastic gradient algorithm for semidefinite optimization using randomization techniques. The algorithm uses subsampling to reduce the computational cost of each iteration and the subsampling ratio explicitly controls…
Policy optimization is among the most popular and successful reinforcement learning algorithms, and there is increasing interest in understanding its theoretical guarantees. In this work, we initiate the study of policy optimization for the…
Continuous action policy search is currently the focus of intensive research, driven both by the recent success of deep reinforcement learning algorithms and the emergence of competitors based on evolutionary algorithms. In this paper, we…
The goal of this paper is to analyze distributional Markov Decision Processes as a class of control problems in which the objective is to learn policies that steer the distribution of a cumulative reward toward a prescribed target law,…
High-quality data plays a central role in ensuring the accuracy of policy evaluation. This paper initiates the study of efficient and safe data collection for bandit policy evaluation. We formulate the problem and investigate its several…