Related papers: Lower Bounds for Policy Iteration on Multi-action …
In this paper we consider infinite horizon discounted dynamic programming problems with finite state and control spaces, partial state observations, and a multiagent structure. We discuss and compare algorithms that simultaneously or…
This paper develops a deep policy iteration method for high-dimensional finite-horizon mean-field games (MFG). We reformulate the game as a regenerative problem with deterministic cycles, which allows policy evaluation (PE), policy…
Interval Markov decision processes are a class of Markov models where the transition probabilities between the states belong to intervals. In this paper, we study the problem of efficient estimation of the optimal policies in Interval…
Bisimulation metrics define a distance measure between states of a Markov decision process (MDP) based on a comparison of reward sequences. Due to this property they provide theoretical guarantees in value function approximation (VFA). In…
We revisit the finite time analysis of policy gradient methods in the one of the simplest settings: finite state and action MDPs with a policy class consisting of all stochastic policies and with exact gradient evaluations. There has been…
Interpretable reinforcement learning policies are essential for high-stakes decision-making, yet optimizing decision tree policies in Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) remains challenging. We propose SPOT, a novel method for computing…
Several hierarchical reinforcement learning methods leverage planning to create a graph or sequences of intermediate goals, guiding a lower-level goal-conditioned (GC) policy to reach some final goals. The low-level policy is typically…
Many policy-based reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms can be viewed as instantiations of approximate policy iteration (PI), i.e., where policy improvement and policy evaluation are both performed approximately. In applications where the…
This paper discusses algorithms for solving Markov decision processes (MDPs) that have monotone optimal policies. We propose a two-stage alternating convex optimization scheme that can accelerate the search for an optimal policy by…
Value iteration is a popular algorithm for finding near optimal policies for POMDPs. It is inefficient due to the need to account for the entire belief space, which necessitates the solution of large numbers of linear programs. In this…
In this paper, we propose a new policy iteration algorithm to compute the value function and the optimal controls of continuous time stochastic control problems. The algorithm relies on successive approximations using linear-quadratic…
Markov Decision Processes are classically solved using Value Iteration and Policy Iteration algorithms. Recent interest in Reinforcement Learning has motivated the study of methods inspired by optimization, such as gradient ascent. Among…
In this paper we discuss $\l$-policy iteration, a method for exact and approximate dynamic programming. It is intermediate between the classical value iteration (VI) and policy iteration (PI) methods, and it is closely related to optimistic…
We introduce a new framework of episodic tabular Markov decision processes (MDPs) with adversarial preferences, which we refer to as preference-based MDPs (PbMDPs). Unlike standard episodic MDPs with adversarial losses, where the numerical…
In this paper, we consider a class of continuous-time, continuous-space stochastic optimal control problems. Building upon recent advances in Markov chain approximation methods and sampling-based algorithms for deterministic path planning,…
We study safe policy improvement (SPI) for partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs). SPI is an offline reinforcement learning (RL) problem that assumes access to (1) historical data about an environment, and (2) the so-called…
This paper studies the approximation of optimal control policies by quantized (discretized) policies for a very general class of Markov decision processes (MDPs). The problem is motivated by applications in networked control systems,…
Existing policy-gradient methods for auto-regressive language models typically select subsequent tokens one at a time as actions in the policy. While effective for many generation tasks, such an approach may not fully capture the structure…
This paper proposes a general incremental policy iteration adaptive dynamic programming (ADP) algorithm for model-free robust optimal control of unknown nonlinear systems. The approach integrates recursive least squares estimation with…
We propose a policy iteration algorithm for solving the multiplicative noise linear quadratic output feedback design problem. The algorithm solves a set of coupled Riccati equations for estimation and control arising from a partially…