Related papers: Reinforcement Learning with Fast Stabilization in …
Ensuring reliability in modern software systems requires rigorous pre-production testing across highly heterogeneous and evolving environments. Because exhaustive evaluation is infeasible, practitioners must decide how to allocate limited…
Despite the numerous advances, reinforcement learning remains away from widespread acceptance for autonomous controller design as compared to classical methods due to lack of ability to effectively tackle the reality gap. The reliance on…
We study reinforcement learning (RL) in settings where observations are high-dimensional, but where an RL agent has access to abstract knowledge about the structure of the state space, as is the case, for example, when a robot is tasked to…
Flexibility design problems are a class of problems that appear in strategic decision-making across industries, where the objective is to design a ($e.g.$, manufacturing) network that affords flexibility and adaptivity. The underlying…
To overcome the curses of dimensionality and modeling of Dynamic Programming (DP) methods to solve Markov Decision Process (MDP) problems, Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods are adopted in practice. Contrary to traditional RL algorithms…
Model-based reinforcement learning (RL) is considered to be a promising approach to reduce the sample complexity that hinders model-free RL. However, the theoretical understanding of such methods has been rather limited. This paper…
This paper proposes a safe reinforcement learning (RL) framework based on forward-invariance-induced action-space design. The control problem is cast as a Markov decision process, but instead of relying on runtime shielding or penalty-based…
The problem of reinforcement learning is considered where the environment or the model undergoes a change. An algorithm is proposed that an agent can apply in such a problem to achieve the optimal long-time discounted reward. The algorithm…
Model-based reinforcement learning (RL) has shown great potential in various control tasks in terms of both sample-efficiency and final performance. However, learning a generalizable dynamics model robust to changes in dynamics remains a…
Deep neural networks coupled with fast simulation and improved computation have led to recent successes in the field of reinforcement learning (RL). However, most current RL-based approaches fail to generalize since: (a) the gap between…
Unsupervised reinforcement learning (RL) studies how to leverage environment statistics to learn useful behaviors without the cost of reward engineering. However, a central challenge in unsupervised RL is to extract behaviors that…
Reinforcement learning (RL) has achieved some impressive recent successes in various computer games and simulations. Most of these successes are based on having large numbers of episodes from which the agent can learn. In typical robotic…
A recent goal in the Reinforcement Learning (RL) framework is to choose a sequence of actions or a policy to maximize the reward collected or minimize the regret incurred in a finite time horizon. For several RL problems in operation…
This dissertation investigates how reinforcement learning (RL) methods can be designed to be safe, sample-efficient, and robust. Framed through the unifying perspective of contextual-bandit RL, the work addresses two major application…
We study reinforcement learning (RL) for the same class of continuous-time stochastic linear--quadratic (LQ) control problems as in \cite{huang2024sublinear}, where volatilities depend on both states and controls while states are…
Reinforcement learning (RL) faces substantial challenges when applied to real-life problems, primarily stemming from the scarcity of available data due to limited interactions with the environment. This limitation is exacerbated by the fact…
Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) aims to learn a reward function and a corresponding policy that best fit the demonstrated trajectories of an expert. However, current IRL works cannot learn incrementally from an ongoing trajectory…
Model-based reinforcement learning is a powerful tool, but collecting data to fit an accurate model of the system can be costly. Exploring an unknown environment in a sample-efficient manner is hence of great importance. However, the…
We investigate an entropy-regularized reinforcement learning (RL) approach to optimal stopping problems motivated by real option models. Classical stopping rules are strict and non-randomized, limiting natural exploration in RL settings. To…
Off-road navigation on vertically challenging terrain, involving steep slopes and rugged boulders, presents significant challenges for wheeled robots both at the planning level to achieve smooth collision-free trajectories and at the…