Related papers: Representations for Stable Off-Policy Reinforcemen…
Off-policy learning allows us to learn about possible policies of behavior from experience generated by a different behavior policy. Temporal difference (TD) learning algorithms can become unstable when combined with function approximation…
We present a distributional approach to theoretical analyses of reinforcement learning algorithms for constant step-sizes. We demonstrate its effectiveness by presenting simple and unified proofs of convergence for a variety of…
We introduce the framework of performative reinforcement learning where the policy chosen by the learner affects the underlying reward and transition dynamics of the environment. Following the recent literature on performative…
This paper analyzes multi-step temporal difference (TD)-learning algorithms within the ``deadly triad'' scenario, characterized by linear function approximation, off-policy learning, and bootstrapping. In particular, we prove that $n$-step…
Value functions derived from Markov decision processes arise as a central component of algorithms as well as performance metrics in many statistics and engineering applications of machine learning techniques. Computation of the solution to…
In this work, we consider policy-based methods for solving the reinforcement learning problem, and establish the sample complexity guarantees. A policy-based algorithm typically consists of an actor and a critic. We consider using various…
Large scale reinforcement learning has become a central tool for improving reasoning in large language models. At this scale, generation is often lagged or asynchronous, so updates are performed on data collected by older policies. This…
Conventional off-policy reinforcement learning (RL) focuses on maximizing the expected return of scalar rewards. Distributional RL (DRL), in contrast, studies the distribution of returns with the distributional Bellman operator in a…
This paper investigates a type of instability that is linked to the greedy policy improvement in approximated reinforcement learning. We show empirically that non-deterministic policy improvement can stabilize methods like LSPI by…
This paper investigates the problem of online prediction learning, where learning proceeds continuously as the agent interacts with an environment. The predictions made by the agent are contingent on a particular way of behaving,…
In this work, we study model-based reinforcement learning (RL) in unknown stabilizable linear dynamical systems. When learning a dynamical system, one needs to stabilize the unknown dynamics in order to avoid system blow-ups. We propose an…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) can effectively learn complex policies. However, learning these policies often demands extensive trial-and-error interactions with the environment. In many real-world scenarios, this approach is not practical due…
In many real-world settings, reinforcement learning systems suffer performance degradation when the environment encountered at deployment differs from that observed during training. Distributionally robust reinforcement learning (DR-RL)…
Maximum entropy deep reinforcement learning (RL) methods have been demonstrated on a range of challenging continuous tasks. However, existing methods either suffer from severe instability when training on large off-policy data or cannot…
We consider the off-policy evaluation problem of reinforcement learning using deep convolutional neural networks. We analyze the deep fitted Q-evaluation method for estimating the expected cumulative reward of a target policy, when the data…
Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has been successfully used to solve various robotic manipulation tasks. However, most of the existing works do not address the issue of control stability. This is in sharp contrast to the control theory…
We present a novel $l_1$ regularized off-policy convergent TD-learning method (termed RO-TD), which is able to learn sparse representations of value functions with low computational complexity. The algorithmic framework underlying RO-TD…
In many reinforcement learning (RL) applications, we want policies that reach desired states and then keep the controlled system within an acceptable region around the desired states over an indefinite period of time. This latter objective…
This paper studies policy transfer, one of the well-known transfer learning techniques adopted in large language models, for continuous-time reinforcement learning problems. In the case of continuous-time linear-quadratic systems with…
In reinforcement learning (RL), state representations are key to dealing with large or continuous state spaces. While one of the promises of deep learning algorithms is to automatically construct features well-tuned for the task they try to…