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Reinforcement learning methods carry a well known bias-variance trade-off in n-step algorithms for optimal control. Unfortunately, this has rarely been addressed in current research. This trade-off principle holds independent of the choice…
In safety-critical decision-making, the environment may evolve over time, and the learner adjusts its risk level accordingly. This work investigates risk-averse online optimization in dynamic environments with varying risk levels, employing…
Cross-validation (CV) is one of the main tools for performance estimation and parameter tuning in machine learning. The general recipe for computing CV estimate is to run a learning algorithm separately for each CV fold, a computationally…
The balance of exploration and exploitation plays a crucial role in accelerating reinforcement learning (RL). To deploy an RL agent in human society, its explainability is also essential. However, basic RL approaches have difficulties in…
Policy-based reinforcement learning currently plays an important role in improving LLMs on mathematical reasoning tasks. However, existing rollout-based reinforcement learning methods (GRPO, DAPO, GSPO, etc.) fail to explicitly consider…
Causal understanding is important in many disciplines of science and engineering, where we seek to understand how different factors in the system causally affect an experiment or situation and pave a pathway towards creating effective or…
Generating safety-critical scenarios is essential for testing and verifying the safety of autonomous vehicles. Traditional optimization techniques suffer from the curse of dimensionality and limit the search space to fixed parameter spaces.…
The capability to widely sample the state and action spaces is a key ingredient toward building effective reinforcement learning algorithms. The variational optimization principles exposed in this paper emphasize the importance of an…
We propose a risk-averse statistical learning framework wherein the performance of a learning algorithm is evaluated by the conditional value-at-risk (CVaR) of losses rather than the expected loss. We devise algorithms based on stochastic…
Classical value iteration approaches are not applicable to environments with continuous states and actions. For such environments, the states and actions are usually discretized, which leads to an exponential increase in computational…
Policies trained via reinforcement learning (RL) are often very complex even for simple tasks. In an episode with n time steps, a policy will make n decisions on actions to take, many of which may appear non-intuitive to the observer.…
First, we analyze the variance of the Cross Validation (CV)-based estimators used for estimating the performance of classification rules. Second, we propose a novel estimator to estimate this variance using the Influence Function (IF)…
The desire to make applications and machines more intelligent and the aspiration to enable their operation without human interaction have been driving innovations in neural networks, deep learning, and other machine learning techniques.…
We consider reinforcement learning in input-driven environments, where an exogenous, stochastic input process affects the dynamics of the system. Input processes arise in many applications, including queuing systems, robotics control with…
Agents capable of accomplishing complex tasks through multiple interactions with the environment have emerged as a popular research direction. However, in such multi-step settings, the conventional group-level policy optimization algorithm…
Organizations struggle to handle sheer number of vulnerabilities in their cloud environments. The de facto methodology used for prioritizing vulnerabilities is to use Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS). However, CVSS has inherent…
Reinforcement learning suffers from limitations in real practices primarily due to the number of required interactions with virtual environments. It results in a challenging problem because we are implausible to obtain a local optimal…
Several works have addressed the problem of incorporating constraints in the reinforcement learning (RL) framework, however majority of them can only guarantee the satisfaction of soft constraints. In this work, we address the problem of…
This paper presents a novel model-free Reinforcement Learning algorithm for learning behavior in continuous action, state, and goal spaces. The algorithm approximates optimal value functions using non-parametric estimators. It is able to…
Continuous-time reinforcement learning (CTRL) provides a natural framework for sequential decision-making in dynamic environments where interactions evolve continuously over time. While CTRL has shown growing empirical success, its ability…