Related papers: Improved Sample Complexity for Incremental Autonom…
Reinforcement learning is a widely used approach to autonomous navigation, showing potential in various tasks and robotic setups. Still, it often struggles to reach distant goals when safety constraints are imposed (e.g., the wheeled robot…
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,…
The policy gradient theorem is defined based on an objective with respect to the initial distribution over states. In the discounted case, this results in policies that are optimal for one distribution over initial states, but may not be…
Directed exploration strategies for reinforcement learning are critical for learning an optimal policy in a minimal number of interactions with the environment. Many algorithms use optimism to direct exploration, either through visitation…
We present Memory Augmented Policy Optimization (MAPO), a simple and novel way to leverage a memory buffer of promising trajectories to reduce the variance of policy gradient estimate. MAPO is applicable to deterministic environments with…
Differentiable planning enables gradient-based optimization of decision-making problems by leveraging differentiable models of system dynamics. However, in highly nonlinear and hybrid discrete-continuous domains, the resulting optimization…
Recent research in robot exploration and mapping has focused on sampling environmental hotspot fields. This exploration task is formalized by Low, Dolan, and Khosla (2008) in a sequential decision-theoretic planning under uncertainty…
Improving sample efficiency has been a longstanding goal in reinforcement learning. This paper proposes $\mathtt{VRMPO}$ algorithm: a sample efficient policy gradient method with stochastic mirror descent. In $\mathtt{VRMPO}$, a novel…
We study the problem of exploration in Reinforcement Learning and present a novel model-free solution. We adopt an information-theoretical viewpoint and start from the instance-specific lower bound of the number of samples that have to be…
This paper studies reward-agnostic exploration in reinforcement learning (RL) -- a scenario where the learner is unware of the reward functions during the exploration stage -- and designs an algorithm that improves over the state of the…
We consider the joint design and control of discrete-time stochastic dynamical systems over a finite time horizon. We formulate the problem as a multi-step optimization problem under uncertainty seeking to identify a system design and a…
Having access to an exploring restart distribution (the so-called wide coverage assumption) is critical with policy gradient methods. This is due to the fact that, while the objective function is insensitive to updates in unlikely states,…
We consider the optimal sample complexity theory of tabular reinforcement learning (RL) for maximizing the infinite horizon discounted reward in a Markov decision process (MDP). Optimal worst-case complexity results have been developed for…
We consider a discounted infinite horizon optimal stopping problem. If the underlying distribution is known a priori, the solution of this problem is obtained via dynamic programming (DP) and is given by a well known threshold rule. When…
We propose MDP-GapE, a new trajectory-based Monte-Carlo Tree Search algorithm for planning in a Markov Decision Process in which transitions have a finite support. We prove an upper bound on the number of calls to the generative models…
Current state-of-the-art multi-objective optimization solvers, by computing gradients of all $m$ objective functions per iteration, produce after $k$ iterations a measure of proximity to critical conditions that is upper-bounded by…
We establish an optimal sample complexity of $O(\epsilon^{-2})$ for obtaining an $\epsilon$-optimal global policy using a single-timescale actor-critic (AC) algorithm in infinite-horizon discounted Markov decision processes (MDPs) with…
We study the optimal sample complexity in large-scale Reinforcement Learning (RL) problems with policy space generalization, i.e. the agent has a prior knowledge that the optimal policy lies in a known policy space. Existing results show…
We consider infinite-horizon $\gamma$-discounted (linear) constrained Markov decision processes (CMDPs) where the objective is to find a policy that maximizes the expected cumulative reward subject to expected cumulative constraints. Given…
Bugs in popular distributed protocol implementations have been the source of many downtimes in popular internet services. We describe a randomized testing approach for distributed protocol implementations based on reinforcement learning.…