Related papers: Bias Correction in Deterministic Policy Gradient U…
Estimation and counterfactual experiments in dynamic discrete choice models with large state spaces pose computational difficulties. This paper proposes a model-adaptive approach, based on the conjugate gradient (CG) method, to solve the…
This paper studies the problem of distributionally robust model predictive control (MPC) using total variation distance ambiguity sets. For a discrete-time linear system with additive disturbances, we provide a conditional value-at-risk…
Reinforcement learning (RL) and model predictive control (MPC) offer complementary strengths, yet combining them at scale remains computationally challenging. We propose soft MPCritic, an RL-MPC framework that learns in (soft) value space…
Model-free deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms have achieved tremendous success on a range of challenging tasks. However, safety concerns remain when these methods are deployed on real-world applications, necessitating risk-aware…
Modeling error or external disturbances can severely degrade the performance of Model Predictive Control (MPC) in real-world scenarios. Robust MPC (RMPC) addresses this limitation by optimizing over feedback policies but at the expense of…
In many sequential decision-making problems we may want to manage risk by minimizing some measure of variability in rewards in addition to maximizing a standard criterion. Variance related risk measures are among the most common…
We focus on a simulation-based optimization problem of choosing the best design from the feasible space. Although the simulation model can be queried with finite samples, its internal processing rule cannot be utilized in the optimization…
We present a novel extension to the family of Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) algorithms. We argue that based on the Maximum Entropy Principle, discrete SAC can be further improved via additional statistical constraints derived from a surrogate…
In this paper, we leverage the rapid advances in imitation learning, a topic of intense recent focus in the Reinforcement Learning (RL) literature, to develop new sample complexity results and performance guarantees for data-driven Model…
We show that the simplest actor-critic method -- a linear softmax policy updated with TD through interaction with a linear MDP, but featuring no explicit regularization or exploration -- does not merely find an optimal policy, but moreover…
Continuous control Deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) approaches are known to suffer from estimation biases, leading to suboptimal policies. This paper introduces innovative methods in RL, focusing on addressing and exploiting estimation…
This paper shows that the optimal policy and value functions of a Markov Decision Process (MDP), either discounted or not, can be captured by a finite-horizon undiscounted Optimal Control Problem (OCP), even if based on an inexact model.…
Policy gradient methods have enjoyed great success in deep reinforcement learning but suffer from high variance of gradient estimates. The high variance problem is particularly exasperated in problems with long horizons or high-dimensional…
Traditional model-based reinforcement learning approaches learn a model of the environment dynamics without explicitly considering how it will be used by the agent. In the presence of misspecified model classes, this can lead to poor…
Policy gradient methods are powerful reinforcement learning algorithms and have been demonstrated to solve many complex tasks. However, these methods are also data-inefficient, afflicted with high variance gradient estimates, and frequently…
In this paper, we propose a policy gradient method for confounded partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) with continuous state and observation spaces in the offline setting. We first establish a novel identification result…
We investigate convergence properties of a proposed distributed model predictive control (DMPC) scheme, where agents negotiate to compute an optimal consensus point using an incremental subgradient method based on primal decomposition as…
We provide performance guarantees for a variant of simulation-based policy iteration for controlling Markov decision processes that involves the use of stochastic approximation algorithms along with state-of-the-art techniques that are…
In this paper, we present Robust Model Predictive Control (MPC) problems with adjustable uncertainty sets. In contrast to standard Robust MPC problems with known uncertainty sets, we treat the uncertainty sets in our problems as additional…
We consider inexact policy iteration methods for large-scale infinite-horizon discounted MDPs with finite spaces, a variant of policy iteration where the policy evaluation step is implemented inexactly using an iterative solver for linear…