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Model-free reinforcement learning has been successfully applied to a range of challenging problems, and has recently been extended to handle large neural network policies and value functions. However, the sample complexity of model-free…
Widely-used deep reinforcement learning algorithms have been shown to fail in the batch setting--learning from a fixed data set without interaction with the environment. Following this result, there have been several papers showing…
Dynamic decision-making under distributional shifts is of fundamental interest in theory and applications of reinforcement learning: The distribution of the environment in which the data is collected can differ from that of the environment…
A key task in Artificial Intelligence is learning effective policies for controlling agents in unknown environments to optimize performance measures. Off-policy learning methods, like Q-learning, allow learners to make optimal decisions…
When the data used for reinforcement learning (RL) are collected by multiple agents in a distributed manner, federated versions of RL algorithms allow collaborative learning without the need for agents to share their local data. In this…
The deep Q-network (DQN) and return-based reinforcement learning are two promising algorithms proposed in recent years. DQN brings advances to complex sequential decision problems, while return-based algorithms have advantages in making use…
We propose a method for learning expressive energy-based policies for continuous states and actions, which has been feasible only in tabular domains before. We apply our method to learning maximum entropy policies, resulting into a new…
In many real world applications, reinforcement learning agents have to optimize multiple objectives while following certain rules or satisfying a list of constraints. Classical methods based on reward shaping, i.e. a weighted combination of…
Distributional reinforcement learning (distributional RL) has seen empirical success in complex Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) in the setting of nonlinear function approximation. However, there are many different ways in which one can…
Traditional approaches to inference of deterministic finite-state automata (DFA) stem from symbolic AI, including both active learning methods (e.g., Angluin's L* algorithm and its variants) and passive techniques (e.g., Biermann and…
We present an approach called Q-probing to adapt a pre-trained language model to maximize a task-specific reward function. At a high level, Q-probing sits between heavier approaches such as finetuning and lighter approaches such as few shot…
While quantum reinforcement learning (RL) has attracted a surge of attention recently, its theoretical understanding is limited. In particular, it remains elusive how to design provably efficient quantum RL algorithms that can address the…
This paper investigates the computational complexity of reinforcement learning in a novel linear function approximation regime, termed partial $q^{\pi}$-realizability. In this framework, the objective is to learn an $\epsilon$-optimal…
We propose a new Q-learning variant, called 2RA Q-learning, that addresses some weaknesses of existing Q-learning methods in a principled manner. One such weakness is an underlying estimation bias which cannot be controlled and often…
This paper investigates the instability of Q-learning in continuous environments, a challenge frequently encountered by practitioners. Traditionally, this instability is attributed to bootstrapping and regression model errors. Using a…
Incorporating high-level knowledge is an effective way to expedite reinforcement learning (RL), especially for complex tasks with sparse rewards. We investigate an RL problem where the high-level knowledge is in the form of reward machines,…
In reinforcement learning an agent interacts with the environment by taking actions and observing the next state and reward. When sampled probabilistically, these state transitions, rewards, and actions can all induce randomness in the…
Maximum entropy inference and learning of graphical models are pivotal tasks in learning theory and optimization. This work extends algorithms for these problems, including generalized iterative scaling (GIS) and gradient descent (GD), to…
We introduce and analyze a form of variance-reduced $Q$-learning. For $\gamma$-discounted MDPs with finite state space $\mathcal{X}$ and action space $\mathcal{U}$, we prove that it yields an $\epsilon$-accurate estimate of the optimal…
Deep reinforcement learning includes a broad family of algorithms that parameterise an internal representation, such as a value function or policy, by a deep neural network. Each algorithm optimises its parameters with respect to an…