Related papers: Shortest-Path Constrained Reinforcement Learning f…
High-level penetration of intermittent renewable energy sources (RESs) has introduced significant uncertainties into modern power systems. In order to rapidly and economically respond to the fluctuations of power system operating state,…
This paper proposes a data-driven distributionally robust shortest path (DRSP) model where the distribution of the travel time in the transportation network can only be partially observed through a finite number of samples. Specifically, we…
It is believed that a model-based approach for reinforcement learning (RL) is the key to reduce sample complexity. However, the understanding of the sample optimality of model-based RL is still largely missing, even for the linear case.…
We study the Safe Reinforcement Learning (SRL) problem using the Constrained Markov Decision Process (CMDP) formulation in which an agent aims to maximize the expected total reward subject to a safety constraint on the expected total value…
We introduce Self-supervised Online Reward Shaping (SORS), which aims to improve the sample efficiency of any RL algorithm in sparse-reward environments by automatically densifying rewards. The proposed framework alternates between…
Monte Carlo Exploring Starts (MCES), which aims to learn the optimal policy using only sample returns, is a simple and natural algorithm in reinforcement learning which has been shown to converge under various conditions. However, the…
Many of the challenges facing today's reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms, such as robustness, generalization, transfer, and computational efficiency are closely related to compression. Prior work has convincingly argued why minimizing…
This paper presents the concept of an adaptive safe padding that forces Reinforcement Learning (RL) to synthesise optimal control policies while ensuring safety during the learning process. Policies are synthesised to satisfy a goal,…
A reinforcement learning agent that needs to pursue different goals across episodes requires a goal-conditional policy. In addition to their potential to generalize desirable behavior to unseen goals, such policies may also enable…
Reinforcement learning (RL) has been widely used in decision-making and control tasks, but the risk is very high for the agent in the training process due to the requirements of interaction with the environment, which seriously limits its…
Engagement-optimized adaptive tutoring systems may prioritize short-term behavioral signals over sustained learning outcomes, creating structural incentives for reward hacking in reinforcement learning policies. We formalize this challenge…
A recent goal in the Reinforcement Learning (RL) framework is to choose a sequence of actions or a policy to maximize the reward collected or minimize the regret incurred in a finite time horizon. For several RL problems in operation…
Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has significantly advanced the field of combinatorial optimization (CO). However, its practicality is hindered by the necessity for a large number of reward evaluations, especially in scenarios involving…
We introduce and study constrained Markov Decision Processes (cMDPs) with anytime constraints. An anytime constraint requires the agent to never violate its budget at any point in time, almost surely. Although Markovian policies are no…
This work presents a new approach to solve the sparse linear regression problem, i.e., to determine a k-sparse vector w in R^d that minimizes the cost ||y - Aw||^2_2. In contrast to the existing methods, our proposed approach splits this…
Reinforcement Learning(RL) with sparse rewards is a major challenge. We propose \emph{Hindsight Trust Region Policy Optimization}(HTRPO), a new RL algorithm that extends the highly successful TRPO algorithm with \emph{hindsight} to tackle…
Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a promising strategy for finetuning small language models (SLMs) to solve targeted tasks such as math and coding. However, RL algorithms tend to be resource-intensive, taking a significant amount…
Single-task RL agents are typically trained under a fixed reward function, which limits their robustness to reward misspecification and their ability to adapt to changing preferences. We introduce Reward-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning…
In analogy to compressed sensing, which allows sample-efficient signal reconstruction given prior knowledge of its sparsity in frequency domain, we propose to utilize policy simplicity (Occam's Razor) as a prior to enable sample-efficient…
We propose an automata-theoretic approach for reinforcement learning (RL) under complex spatio-temporal constraints with time windows. The problem is formulated using a Markov decision process under a bounded temporal logic constraint.…