Related papers: Provably Correct Optimization and Exploration with…
We propose a novel randomized linear programming algorithm for approximating the optimal policy of the discounted Markov decision problem. By leveraging the value-policy duality and binary-tree data structures, the algorithm adaptively…
We propose a novel framework to solve risk-sensitive reinforcement learning (RL) problems where the agent optimises time-consistent dynamic spectral risk measures. Based on the notion of conditional elicitability, our methodology constructs…
Safety is essential for reinforcement learning (RL) applied in real-world situations. Chance constraints are suitable to represent the safety requirements in stochastic systems. Previous chance-constrained RL methods usually have a low…
Policy gradient (PG) methods are successful approaches to deal with continuous reinforcement learning (RL) problems. They learn stochastic parametric (hyper)policies by either exploring in the space of actions or in the space of parameters.…
We present an off-policy actor-critic algorithm for Reinforcement Learning (RL) that combines ideas from gradient-free optimization via stochastic search with learned action-value function. The result is a simple procedure consisting of…
We study multi-objective reinforcement learning with nonlinear preferences over trajectories. That is, we maximize the expected value of a nonlinear function over accumulated rewards (expected scalarized return or ESR) in a multi-objective…
Among the reasons hindering reinforcement learning (RL) applications to real-world problems, two factors are critical: limited data and the mismatch between the testing environment (real environment in which the policy is deployed) and the…
Searching the space of policies directly for the optimal policy has been one popular method for solving partially observable reinforcement learning problems. Typically, with each change of the target policy, its value is estimated from the…
Reinforcement learning (RL) in discrete action space is ubiquitous in real-world applications, but its complexity grows exponentially with the action-space dimension, making it challenging to apply existing on-policy gradient based deep RL…
Machine learning is now ubiquitous in societal decision-making, for example in evaluating job candidates or loan applications, and it is increasingly important to take into account how classified agents will react to the learning…
Reinforcement learning for control over continuous spaces typically uses high-entropy stochastic policies, such as Gaussian distributions, for local exploration and estimating policy gradient to optimize performance. Many robotic control…
In inverse reinforcement learning (IRL), an agent seeks to replicate expert demonstrations through interactions with the environment. Traditionally, IRL is treated as an adversarial game, where an adversary searches over reward models, and…
We prove under commonly used assumptions the convergence of actor-critic reinforcement learning algorithms, which simultaneously learn a policy function, the actor, and a value function, the critic. Both functions can be deep neural…
Neural Network based approximations of the Value function make up the core of leading Policy Based methods such as Trust Regional Policy Optimization (TRPO) and Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO). While this adds significant value when…
Direct policy gradient methods for reinforcement learning are a successful approach for a variety of reasons: they are model free, they directly optimize the performance metric of interest, and they allow for richly parameterized policies.…
We study the convergence of the actor-critic algorithm with nonlinear function approximation under a nonconvex-nonconcave primal-dual formulation. Stochastic gradient descent ascent is applied with an adaptive proximal term for robust…
Policy-gradient methods in Reinforcement Learning(RL) are very universal and widely applied in practice but their performance suffers from the high variance of the gradient estimate. Several procedures were proposed to reduce it including…
An optimal feedback controller for a given Markov decision process (MDP) can in principle be synthesized by value or policy iteration. However, if the system dynamics and the reward function are unknown, a learning agent must discover an…
Traditional Reinforcement Learning (RL) policies are typically implemented with fixed control rates, often disregarding the impact of control rate selection. This can lead to inefficiencies as the optimal control rate varies with task…
We consider off-policy evaluation and optimization with continuous action spaces. We focus on observational data where the data collection policy is unknown and needs to be estimated. We take a semi-parametric approach where the value…