Related papers: Beyond variance reduction: Understanding the true …
Policy regret is a well established notion of measuring the performance of an online learning algorithm against an adaptive adversary. We study restrictions on the adversary that enable efficient minimization of the \emph{complete policy…
Decision trees, without appropriate constraints, can easily become overly complex and prone to overfit, capturing noise rather than generalizable patterns. To resolve this problem,pruning operation is a crucial part in optimizing decision…
This study investigates a counterintuitive phenomenon in adversarial machine learning: the potential for noise-based defenses to inadvertently aid evasion attacks in certain scenarios. While randomness is often employed as a defensive…
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…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) is an effective tool for controller design but can struggle with issues of robustness, failing catastrophically when the underlying system dynamics are perturbed. The Robust RL formulation tackles this by adding…
We consider the problem of Reinforcement Learning for nonlinear stochastic dynamical systems. We show that in the RL setting, there is an inherent ``Curse of Variance" in addition to Bellman's infamous ``Curse of Dimensionality", in…
This work studies a Reinforcement Learning (RL) problem in which we are given a set of trajectories collected with K baseline policies. Each of these policies can be quite suboptimal in isolation, and have strong performance in…
Bandit algorithms have been predominantly analyzed in the convex setting with function-value based stationary regret as the performance measure. In this paper, motivated by online reinforcement learning problems, we propose and analyze…
We study the constrained variant of the \emph{multi-armed bandit} (MAB) problem, in which the learner aims not only at minimizing the total loss incurred during the learning dynamic, but also at controlling the violation of multiple…
The construction by Du et al. (2019) implies that even if a learner is given linear features in $\mathbb R^d$ that approximate the rewards in a bandit with a uniform error of $\epsilon$, then searching for an action that is optimal up to…
In this paper, we consider the problem of optimization and learning for constrained and multi-objective Markov decision processes, for both discounted rewards and expected average rewards. We formulate the problems as zero-sum games where…
Many practical applications of online reinforcement learning require the satisfaction of safety constraints while learning about the unknown environment. In this work, we establish theoretical foundations for reinforcement learning with…
We consider reinforcement learning (RL) methods for finding optimal policies in linear quadratic (LQ) mean field control (MFC) problems over an infinite horizon in continuous time, with common noise and entropy regularization. We study…
Recently, it has been shown that the Stochastic Gradient Bandit (SGB) algorithm converges to a globally optimal policy with a constant learning rate. However, these guarantees rely on unrealistic assumptions about the learning process,…
Guided policy search algorithms have been proven to work with incredible accuracy for not only controlling a complicated dynamical system, but also learning optimal policies from various unseen instances. One assumes true nature of the…
A large number of heuristics have been proposed to optimize the reinforcement fine-tuning of LLMs. However, inconsistent claims are made from time to time, making this area elusive. Reflecting on this situation, two fundamental questions…
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…
The analysis in Part I revealed interesting properties for subgradient learning algorithms in the context of stochastic optimization when gradient noise is present. These algorithms are used when the risk functions are non-smooth and…
We develop a learning principle and an efficient algorithm for batch learning from logged bandit feedback. This learning setting is ubiquitous in online systems (e.g., ad placement, web search, recommendation), where an algorithm makes a…
Solutions to address the periodic review inventory control problem with nonstationary random demand, lost sales, and stochastic vendor lead times typically involve making strong assumptions on the dynamics for either approximation or…