Related papers: Shortest-Path Constrained Reinforcement Learning f…
In this work, we provide theoretical guarantees for reward decomposition in deterministic MDPs. Reward decomposition is a special case of Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning, that allows one to learn many policies in parallel and combine…
Current reinforcement-learning methods are unable to directly learn policies that solve the minimum cost reach-avoid problem to minimize cumulative costs subject to the constraints of reaching the goal and avoiding unsafe states, as the…
Reinforcement learning with sparse rewards is challenging because an agent can rarely obtain non-zero rewards and hence, gradient-based optimization of parameterized policies can be incremental and slow. Recent work demonstrated that using…
Meta reinforcement learning (meta-RL) aims to learn a policy solving a set of training tasks simultaneously and quickly adapting to new tasks. It requires massive amounts of data drawn from training tasks to infer the common structure…
In this paper, we define the reoptimization variant of the closest substring problem (CSP) under sequence addition. We show that, even with the additional information we have about the problem instance, the problem of finding a closest…
Reinforcement learning often needs to deal with the exponential growth of states and actions when exploring optimal control in high-dimensional spaces (often known as the curse of dimensionality). In this work, we address this issue by…
We consider the problem of finding optimal policies for a Markov Decision Process with almost sure constraints on state transitions and action triplets. We define value and action-value functions that satisfy a barrier-based decomposition…
We consider a constrained Markov Decision Problem (CMDP) where the goal of an agent is to maximize the expected discounted sum of rewards over an infinite horizon while ensuring that the expected discounted sum of costs exceeds a certain…
One of the key approaches to save samples in reinforcement learning (RL) is to use knowledge from an approximate model such as its simulator. However, how much does an approximate model help to learn a near-optimal policy of the true…
The shortest path (SP) and shortest paths tree (SPT) problems arise both as direct applications and as subroutines of overlay algorithms solving more complex problems such as the constrained shortest path (CSP) or the constrained minimum…
In this paper, we study a novel episodic risk-sensitive Reinforcement Learning (RL) problem, named Iterated CVaR RL, which aims to maximize the tail of the reward-to-go at each step, and focuses on tightly controlling the risk of getting…
Sample efficiency is one of the most critical issues for online reinforcement learning (RL). Existing methods achieve higher sample efficiency by adopting model-based methods, Q-ensemble, or better exploration mechanisms. We, instead,…
Reinforcement learning is a widely used approach to autonomous navigation, showing potential in various tasks and robotic setups. Still, it often struggles to reach distant goals when safety constraints are imposed (e.g., the wheeled robot…
This paper considers a class of reinforcement learning problems, which involve systems with two types of states: stochastic and pseudo-stochastic. In such systems, stochastic states follow a stochastic transition kernel while the…
We study the reward-free reinforcement learning framework, which is particularly suitable for batch reinforcement learning and scenarios where one needs policies for multiple reward functions. This framework has two phases. In the…
Ensuring safety is important for the practical deployment of reinforcement learning (RL). Various challenges must be addressed, such as handling stochasticity in the environments, providing rigorous guarantees of persistent state-wise…
Deep reinforcement learning algorithms require large amounts of experience to learn an individual task. While in principle meta-reinforcement learning (meta-RL) algorithms enable agents to learn new skills from small amounts of experience,…
By leveraging differentiable dynamics, Reparameterization Policy Gradient (RPG) achieves high sample efficiency. However, current approaches are hindered by two critical limitations: the under-utilization of computationally expensive…
In this paper, we consider a modified version of the control problem in a model free Markov decision process (MDP) setting with large state and action spaces. The control problem most commonly addressed in the contemporary literature is to…
Reinforcement learning has long struggled with poor sample efficiency. One promising approach to mitigate this problem is leveraging group-invariant Markov Decision Processes ($G$-invariant MDPs). Existing works in this direction have…