Related papers: A Convex Programming Approach to Data-Driven Risk-…
Learning to make decisions from observed data in dynamic environments remains a problem of fundamental importance in a number of fields, from artificial intelligence and robotics, to medicine and finance. This paper concerns the problem of…
Many of the challenges facing today's reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms, such as robustness, generalization, transfer, and computational efficiency are closely related to compression. Prior work has convincingly argued why minimizing…
In dynamic programming (DP) and reinforcement learning (RL), an agent learns to act optimally in terms of expected long-term return by sequentially interacting with its environment modeled by a Markov decision process (MDP). More generally…
Dynamic Programming (DP) provides standard algorithms to solve Markov Decision Processes. However, these algorithms generally do not optimize a scalar objective function. In this paper, we draw connections between DP and (constrained)…
Robust Markov Decision Processes (RMDPs) have received significant research interest, offering an alternative to standard Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) that often assume fixed transition probabilities. RMDPs address this by optimizing…
We propose a risk-averse statistical learning framework wherein the performance of a learning algorithm is evaluated by the conditional value-at-risk (CVaR) of losses rather than the expected loss. We devise algorithms based on stochastic…
Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a promising strategy for finetuning small language models (SLMs) to solve targeted tasks such as math and coding. However, RL algorithms tend to be resource-intensive, taking a significant amount…
The learning inefficiency of reinforcement learning (RL) from scratch hinders its practical application towards continuous robotic tracking control, especially for high-dimensional robots. This work proposes a data-informed residual…
Conditional value-at-risk (CVaR) is a prominent risk measure in financial engineering, energy systems, and supply chain management. In these domains, Markov decision processes (MDPs) with a long-run CVaR criterion effectively mitigate cost…
Action-constrained reinforcement learning (RL) is a widely-used approach in various real-world applications, such as scheduling in networked systems with resource constraints and control of a robot with kinematic constraints. While the…
Robotic systems must be able to quickly and robustly make decisions when operating in uncertain and dynamic environments. While Reinforcement Learning (RL) can be used to compute optimal policies with little prior knowledge about the…
The field of risk-constrained reinforcement learning (RCRL) has been developed to effectively reduce the likelihood of worst-case scenarios by explicitly handling risk-measure-based constraints. However, the nonlinearity of risk measures…
Reinforcement learning (RL) has been widely used in decision-making and control tasks, but the risk is very high for the agent in the training process due to the requirements of interaction with the environment, which seriously limits its…
The paradigm of decision-making has been revolutionised by reinforcement learning and deep learning. Although this has led to significant progress in domains such as robotics, healthcare, and finance, the use of RL in practice is…
An emerging field of sequential decision problems is safe Reinforcement Learning (RL), where the objective is to maximize the reward while obeying safety constraints. Being able to handle constraints is essential for deploying RL agents in…
This article studies inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) for the stochastic linear-quadratic optimal control problem, where two agents are considered. A learner agent does not know the expert agent's performance cost function, but it…
This paper introduces a novel data-driven approach to design a linear quadratic regulator (LQR) using a reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm that does not require a system model. The key contribution is to perform policy iteration (PI) by…
Offline reinforcement learning aims to learn from pre-collected datasets without active exploration. This problem faces significant challenges, including limited data availability and distributional shifts. Existing approaches adopt a…
We introduce PACOH-RL, a novel model-based Meta-Reinforcement Learning (Meta-RL) algorithm designed to efficiently adapt control policies to changing dynamics. PACOH-RL meta-learns priors for the dynamics model, allowing swift adaptation to…
Direct policy gradient methods for reinforcement learning and continuous control problems are a popular approach for a variety of reasons: 1) they are easy to implement without explicit knowledge of the underlying model 2) they are an…