Related papers: A Natural Actor-Critic Algorithm with Downside Ris…
Continuous control is a widely applicable area of reinforcement learning. The main players of this area are actor-critic methods that utilize policy gradients of neural approximators as a common practice. The focus of our study is to show…
Despite impressive results, reinforcement learning (RL) suffers from slow convergence and requires a large variety of tuning strategies. In this paper, we investigate the ability of RL algorithms on simple continuous control tasks. We show…
In this work, we study the problem of finding robust and safe policies in Robust Constrained Average-Cost Markov Decision Processes (RCMDPs). A key challenge in this setting is the lack of strong duality, which prevents the direct use of…
We study the exploration problem with approximate linear action-value functions in episodic reinforcement learning under the notion of low inherent Bellman error, a condition normally employed to show convergence of approximate value…
While reinforcement learning algorithms provide automated acquisition of optimal policies, practical application of such methods requires a number of design decisions, such as manually designing reward functions that not only define the…
Off-policy actor-critic methods in reinforcement learning train a critic with temporal-difference updates and use it as a learning signal for the policy (actor). This design typically achieves higher sample efficiency than purely on-policy…
Mainstream approximate action-value iteration reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms suffer from overestimation bias, leading to suboptimal policies in high-variance stochastic environments. Quantile-based action-value iteration methods…
Value function learning plays a central role in many state-of-the-art reinforcement-learning algorithms. Many popular algorithms like Q-learning do not optimize any objective function, but are fixed-point iterations of some variant of…
This paper investigates methods for estimating the optimal stochastic control policy for a Markov Decision Process with unknown transition dynamics and an unknown reward function. This form of model-free reinforcement learning comprises…
We introduce a new algorithm for multi-objective reinforcement learning (MORL) with linear preferences, with the goal of enabling few-shot adaptation to new tasks. In MORL, the aim is to learn policies over multiple competing objectives…
We study policy gradient for mean-field control in continuous time in a reinforcement learning setting. By considering randomised policies with entropy regularisation, we derive a gradient expectation representation of the value function,…
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…
We study the feasibility and noise sensitivity of portfolio optimization under some downside risk measures (Value-at-Risk, Expected Shortfall, and semivariance) when they are estimated by fitting a parametric distribution on a finite sample…
Distributional reinforcement learning (RL) is a powerful framework increasingly adopted in safety-critical domains for its ability to optimize risk-sensitive objectives. However, the role of the discount factor is often overlooked, as it is…
We develop a neural-network framework for multi-period risk--reward stochastic control problems with constrained two-step feedback policies that may be discontinuous in the state. We allow a broad class of objectives built on a…
In this paper, we investigate the infinite-horizon risk-constrained linear quadratic regulator problem (RC-QR), which augments the classical LQR formulation with a statistical constraint on the variability of the system state to incorporate…
We identify two issues with the family of algorithms based on the Adversarial Imitation Learning framework. The first problem is implicit bias present in the reward functions used in these algorithms. While these biases might work well for…
Commonly in reinforcement learning (RL), rewards are discounted over time using an exponential function to model time preference, thereby bounding the expected long-term reward. In contrast, in economics and psychology, it has been shown…
In reinforcement learning the Q-values summarize the expected future rewards that the agent will attain. However, they cannot capture the epistemic uncertainty about those rewards. In this work we derive a new Bellman operator with…
We propose an actor-critic framework to solve the time-continuous stochastic optimal control problem. A least square temporal difference method is applied to compute the value function for the critic. The policy gradient method is…