Related papers: A Natural Actor-Critic Algorithm with Downside Ris…
Distributional reinforcement learning algorithms have attempted to utilize estimated uncertainty for exploration, such as optimism in the face of uncertainty. However, using the estimated variance for optimistic exploration may cause biased…
We propose a reinforcement learning (RL) framework under a broad class of risk objectives, characterized by convex scoring functions. This class covers many common risk measures, such as variance, Expected Shortfall, entropic Value-at-Risk,…
We devise a control-theoretic reinforcement learning approach to support direct learning of the optimal policy. We establish various theoretical properties of our approach, such as convergence and optimality of our analog of the Bellman…
Actor-critic algorithms have become a cornerstone in reinforcement learning (RL), leveraging the strengths of both policy-based and value-based methods. Despite recent progress in understanding their statistical efficiency, no existing work…
In many sequential decision-making problems we may want to manage risk by minimizing some measure of variability in rewards in addition to maximizing a standard criterion. Variance related risk measures are among the most common…
Policy gradient algorithms typically combine discounted future rewards with an estimated value function, to compute the direction and magnitude of parameter updates. However, for most Reinforcement Learning tasks, humans can provide…
In reinforcement learning, robust policies for high-stakes decision-making problems with limited data are usually computed by optimizing the percentile criterion, which minimizes the probability of a catastrophic failure. Unfortunately,…
In many sequential decision-making problems one is interested in minimizing an expected cumulative cost while taking into account \emph{risk}, i.e., increased awareness of events of small probability and high consequences. Accordingly, the…
Recently, safe reinforcement learning (RL) with the actor-critic structure for continuous control tasks has received increasing attention. It is still challenging to learn a near-optimal control policy with safety and convergence…
Current approaches to model-based offline reinforcement learning often incorporate uncertainty-based reward penalization to address the distributional shift problem. These approaches, commonly known as pessimistic value iteration, use Monte…
In this paper, we consider the risk-sensitive cost criterion with exponentiated costs for Markov decision processes and develop a model-free policy gradient algorithm in this setting. Unlike additive cost criteria such as average or…
In real-world decision-making problems, for instance in the fields of finance, robotics or autonomous driving, keeping uncertainty under control is as important as maximizing expected returns. Risk aversion has been addressed in the…
Policy gradient methods are powerful reinforcement learning algorithms and have been demonstrated to solve many complex tasks. However, these methods are also data-inefficient, afflicted with high variance gradient estimates, and frequently…
Off-policy Reinforcement Learning (RL) holds the promise of better data efficiency as it allows sample reuse and potentially enables safe interaction with the environment. Current off-policy policy gradient methods either suffer from high…
Humans have the ability to deviate from their natural behavior when necessary, which is a cognitive process called response inhibition. Similar approaches have independently received increasing attention in recent years for ensuring the…
We study a new two-time-scale stochastic gradient method for solving optimization problems, where the gradients are computed with the aid of an auxiliary variable under samples generated by time-varying MDPs controlled by the underlying…
Learning optimal behavior from existing data is one of the most important problems in Reinforcement Learning (RL). This is known as "off-policy control" in RL where an agent's objective is to compute an optimal policy based on the data…
Risk-sensitive reinforcement learning (RL) has become a popular tool for controlling the risk of uncertain outcomes and ensuring reliable performance in highly stochastic sequential decision-making problems. While it has been shown that…
Actor-critic algorithms are widely used in reinforcement learning, but are challenging to mathematically analyse due to the online arrival of non-i.i.d. data samples. The distribution of the data samples dynamically changes as the model is…
Offline reinforcement learning promises policy improvement from logged interaction data alone, yet state-of-the-art algorithms remain vulnerable to value over-estimation and to violations of domain knowledge such as monotonicity or…