Related papers: A Generalized Projected Bellman Error for Off-poli…
Learning the value function of a given policy (target policy) from the data samples obtained from a different policy (behavior policy) is an important problem in Reinforcement Learning (RL). This problem is studied under the setting of…
We study the problem of computing the value function from a discretely-observed trajectory of a continuous-time diffusion process. We develop a new class of algorithms based on easily implementable numerical schemes that are compatible with…
Reinforcement learning (RL) is a classical tool to solve network control or policy optimization problems in unknown environments. The original Q-learning suffers from performance and complexity challenges across very large networks. Herein,…
Value function approximation has demonstrated phenomenal empirical success in reinforcement learning (RL). Nevertheless, despite a handful of recent progress on developing theory for RL with linear function approximation, the understanding…
Policy gradient methods in reinforcement learning update policy parameters by taking steps in the direction of an estimated gradient of policy value. In this paper, we consider the statistically efficient estimation of policy gradients from…
An estimation problem of fundamental interest is that of phase synchronization, in which the goal is to recover a collection of phases using noisy measurements of relative phases. It is known that in the Gaussian noise setting, the maximum…
When faced with a novel scenario, it can be hard to succeed on the first attempt. In these challenging situations, it is important to know how to retry quickly and meaningfully. Retrying behavior can emerge naturally in robots trained on…
Reinforcement Learning aims at identifying and evaluating efficient control policies from data. In many real-world applications, the learner is not allowed to experiment and cannot gather data in an online manner (this is the case when…
In offline reinforcement learning (RL), a learner leverages prior logged data to learn a good policy without interacting with the environment. A major challenge in applying such methods in practice is the lack of both theoretically…
In a sequential decision-making problem, off-policy evaluation estimates the expected cumulative reward of a target policy using logged trajectory data generated from a different behavior policy, without execution of the target policy.…
Keeping risk under control is often more crucial than maximizing expected rewards in real-world decision-making situations, such as finance, robotics, autonomous driving, etc. The most natural choice of risk measures is variance, which…
We propose a novel algorithmic framework for distributional reinforcement learning, based on learning finite-dimensional mean embeddings of return distributions. We derive several new algorithms for dynamic programming and…
Motivated by value function estimation in reinforcement learning, we study statistical linear inverse problems, i.e., problems where the coefficients of a linear system to be solved are observed in noise. We consider penalized estimators,…
In reinforcement learning, experience replay stores past samples for further reuse. Prioritized sampling is a promising technique to better utilize these samples. Previous criteria of prioritization include TD error, recentness and…
We seek to learn an effective policy for a Markov Decision Process (MDP) with continuous states via Q-Learning. Given a set of basis functions over state action pairs we search for a corresponding set of linear weights that minimizes the…
Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has achieved remarkable success across multiple domains, including competitive games, natural language processing, and robotics. Despite these advancements, policies trained via DRL often struggle to…
Maximum entropy deep reinforcement learning (RL) methods have been demonstrated on a range of challenging continuous tasks. However, existing methods either suffer from severe instability when training on large off-policy data or cannot…
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…
We study distributional off-policy evaluation (OPE), of which the goal is to learn the distribution of the return for a target policy using offline data generated by a different policy. The theoretical foundation of many existing work…
Fitted $Q$-evaluation (FQE) is a standard regression-based tool for off-policy evaluation, but existing stability guarantees often rely on Bellman completeness, a strong closure condition that can fail under function approximation. We study…