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Much attention has been devoted recently to the development of machine learning algorithms with the goal of improving treatment policies in healthcare. Reinforcement learning (RL) is a sub-field within machine learning that is concerned…
Many traditional algorithms for solving combinatorial optimization problems involve using hand-crafted heuristics that sequentially construct a solution. Such heuristics are designed by domain experts and may often be suboptimal due to the…
This thesis develops theoretical frameworks and algorithms that advance constrained reinforcement learning (RL) across control, preference learning, and alignment of large language models. The first contribution addresses constrained Markov…
Maritime surveillance missions, such as search and rescue and environmental monitoring, rely on the efficient allocation of sensing assets over vast and geometrically complex areas. Traditional Coverage Path Planning (CPP) approaches depend…
Continuous-time nonlinear optimal control problems hold great promise in real-world applications. After decades of development, reinforcement learning (RL) has achieved some of the greatest successes as a general nonlinear control design…
A reinforcement learning (RL) policy trained in a nominal environment could fail in a new/perturbed environment due to the existence of dynamic variations. Existing robust methods try to obtain a fixed policy for all envisioned dynamic…
Reliant on too many experiments to learn good actions, current Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms have limited applicability in real-world settings, which can be too expensive to allow exploration. We propose an algorithm for batch RL,…
Off-Policy reinforcement learning (RL) is an important class of methods for many problem domains, such as robotics, where the cost of collecting data is high and on-policy methods are consequently intractable. Standard methods for applying…
Entropic regularization of policies in Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a commonly used heuristic to ensure that the learned policy explores the state-space sufficiently before overfitting to a local optimal policy. The primary motivation for…
This paper demonstrates that continual relearning of control policies using incremental deep reinforcement learning (RL) can improve policy learning for non-stationary processes. We demonstrate this approach for a data-driven 'smart…
Imitation learning from human demonstrations enables robots to perform complex manipulation tasks and has recently witnessed huge success. However, these techniques often struggle to adapt behavior to new preferences or changes in the…
This paper studies the adaptive optimal stationary control of continuous-time linear stochastic systems with both additive and multiplicative noises, using reinforcement learning techniques. Based on policy iteration, a novel off-policy…
Safe reinforcement learning (RL) seeks to mitigate unsafe behaviors that arise from exploration during training by reducing constraint violations while maintaining task performance. Existing approaches typically rely on a single policy to…
This paper proposes an on-policy reinforcement learning (RL) control algorithm that solves the optimal regulation problem for a class of uncertain continuous-time nonlinear systems under user-defined state constraints. We formulate the safe…
In this paper, a new population-guided parallel learning scheme is proposed to enhance the performance of off-policy reinforcement learning (RL). In the proposed scheme, multiple identical learners with their own value-functions and…
We study constrained reinforcement learning (CRL) from a novel perspective by setting constraints directly on state density functions, rather than the value functions considered by previous works. State density has a clear physical and…
We introduce Multi-CALF, an algorithm that intelligently combines reinforcement learning policies based on their relative value improvements. Our approach integrates a standard RL policy with a theoretically-backed alternative policy,…
The inputs and preferences of human users are important considerations in situations where these users interact with autonomous cyber or cyber-physical systems. In these scenarios, one is often interested in aligning behaviors of the system…
We make an important connection to existing results in econometrics to describe an alternative formulation of inverse reinforcement learning (IRL). In particular, we describe an algorithm using Conditional Choice Probabilities (CCP), which…
Standard reinforcement learning (RL) aims to find an optimal policy that identifies the best action for each state. However, in healthcare settings, many actions may be near-equivalent with respect to the reward (e.g., survival). We…