Related papers: The Curse of Passive Data Collection in Batch Rein…
The curse of dimensionality is a widely known issue in reinforcement learning (RL). In the tabular setting where the state space $\mathcal{S}$ and the action space $\mathcal{A}$ are both finite, to obtain a nearly optimal policy with…
The epidemic failure of replicability across empirical science and machine learning has recently motivated the formal study of replicable learning algorithms [Impagliazzo et al. (2022)]. In batch settings where data comes from a fixed…
We study the problem of learning policies that maximize cumulative reward while satisfying safety constraints, even when the real environment differs from a simulator or nominal model. We focus on robust constrained Markov decision…
We consider controller synthesis for stochastic and partially unknown environments in which safety is essential. Specifically, we abstract the problem as a Markov decision process in which the expected performance is measured using a cost…
We study the offline data-driven sequential decision making problem in the framework of Markov decision process (MDP). In order to enhance the generalizability and adaptivity of the learned policy, we propose to evaluate each policy by a…
Recently, there has been significant progress in understanding reinforcement learning in discounted infinite-horizon Markov decision processes (MDPs) by deriving tight sample complexity bounds. However, in many real-world applications, an…
A standard assumption in Reinforcement Learning is that the agent observes every visited state-action pair in the associated Markov Decision Process (MDP), along with the per-step rewards. Strong theoretical results are known in this…
In many practical sequential decision-making problems, tracking the state of the environment incurs a sensing/communication/computation cost. In these settings, the agent's interaction with its environment includes the additional component…
Real-world sequential decision making problems commonly involve partial observability, which requires the agent to maintain a memory of history in order to infer the latent states, plan and make good decisions. Coping with partial…
We consider a Reinforcement Learning setup where an agent interacts with an environment in observation-reward-action cycles without any (esp.\ MDP) assumptions on the environment. State aggregation and more generally feature reinforcement…
This paper investigates model robustness in reinforcement learning (RL) to reduce the sim-to-real gap in practice. We adopt the framework of distributionally robust Markov decision processes (RMDPs), aimed at learning a policy that…
Value iteration is a well-known method of solving Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) that is simple to implement and boasts strong theoretical convergence guarantees. However, the computational cost of value iteration quickly becomes…
This paper studies the sample-efficiency of learning in Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs), a challenging problem in reinforcement learning that is known to be exponentially hard in the worst-case. Motivated by…
Determining the most appropriate features for machine learning predictive models is challenging regarding performance and feature acquisition costs. In particular, global feature choice is limited given that some features will only benefit…
We consider the problem of learning the optimal action-value function in the discounted-reward Markov decision processes (MDPs). We prove a new PAC bound on the sample-complexity of model-based value iteration algorithm in the presence of…
We consider a class of optimization problems over stochastic variables where the algorithm can learn information about the value of any variable through a series of costly steps; we model this information acquisition process as a Markov…
Applications of Reinforcement Learning (RL), in which agents learn to make a sequence of decisions despite lacking complete information about the latent states of the controlled system, that is, they act under partial observability of the…
In offline reinforcement learning (RL), the absence of active exploration calls for attention on the model robustness to tackle the sim-to-real gap, where the discrepancy between the simulated and deployed environments can significantly…
In this study, we derive Probably Approximately Correct (PAC) bounds on the asymptotic sample-complexity for RL within the infinite-horizon Markov Decision Process (MDP) setting that are sharper than those in existing literature. The…
Safety is a fundamental challenge in reinforcement learning (RL), particularly in real-world applications such as autonomous driving, robotics, and healthcare. To address this, Constrained Markov Decision Processes (CMDPs) are commonly used…