Related papers: STOPS: Short-Term-based Volatility-controlled Poli…
Proximal policy optimization (PPO) has yielded state-of-the-art results in policy search, a subfield of reinforcement learning, with one of its key points being the use of a surrogate objective function to restrict the step size at each…
Policies for Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs) are often designed using a nominal system model. In practice, this model can deviate from the true system during deployment due to factors such as calibration drift or…
In many reinforcement learning (RL) applications, we want policies that reach desired states and then keep the controlled system within an acceptable region around the desired states over an indefinite period of time. This latter objective…
Safe reinforcement learning aims to learn the optimal policy while satisfying safety constraints, which is essential in real-world applications. However, current algorithms still struggle for efficient policy updates with hard constraint…
Policy optimization is among the most popular and successful reinforcement learning algorithms, and there is increasing interest in understanding its theoretical guarantees. In this work, we initiate the study of policy optimization for the…
Collision-free mobile robot navigation is an important problem for many robotics applications, especially in cluttered environments. In such environments, obstacles can be static or dynamic. Dynamic obstacles can additionally be…
We use martingale and stochastic analysis techniques to study a continuous-time optimal stopping problem, in which the decision maker uses a dynamic convex risk measure to evaluate future rewards. We also find a saddle point for an…
When users work with AI agents, they form conscious or subconscious expectations of them. Meeting user expectations is crucial for such agents to engage in successful interactions and teaming. However, users may form expectations of an…
We introduce the Stochastic Correlated Obstacle Scene (SCOS) problem, a navigation setting with spatially correlated obstacles of uncertain blockage status, realistically constrained sensors that provide noisy readings and costly…
Temporal point processes have been widely applied to model event sequence data generated by online users. In this paper, we consider the problem of how to design the optimal control policy for point processes, such that the stochastic…
Robots are increasingly entering uncertain and unstructured environments. Within these, robots are bound to face unexpected external disturbances like accidental human or tool collisions. Robots must develop the capacity to respond to…
Reinforcement learning is a framework for interactive decision-making with incentives sequentially revealed across time without a system dynamics model. Due to its scaling to continuous spaces, we focus on policy search where one…
Multi-turn interaction remains challenging for online reinforcement learning. A common solution is trajectory-level optimization, which treats each trajectory as a single training sample. However, this approach can be inefficient and yield…
We consider the joint design and control of discrete-time stochastic dynamical systems over a finite time horizon. We formulate the problem as a multi-step optimization problem under uncertainty seeking to identify a system design and a…
Goal-oriented Reinforcement Learning, where the agent needs to reach the goal state while simultaneously minimizing the cost, has received significant attention in real-world applications. Its theoretical formulation, stochastic shortest…
Guided policy search algorithms have been proven to work with incredible accuracy for not only controlling a complicated dynamical system, but also learning optimal policies from various unseen instances. One assumes true nature of the…
We present a method for finding optimal hedging policies for arbitrary initial portfolios and market states. We develop a novel actor-critic algorithm for solving general risk-averse stochastic control problems and use it to learn hedging…
Markov decision processes (MDPs) are the defacto frame-work for sequential decision making in the presence ofstochastic uncertainty. A classical optimization criterion forMDPs is to maximize the expected discounted-sum pay-off, which…
Optimal stopping is a fundamental problem in optimization with applications in risk management, finance, robotics, and machine learning. We extend the standard framework to a multi-agent setting, named multi-agent optimal stopping (MAOS),…
We study the numerical solution of nonlinear partially observed optimal stopping problems. The system state is taken to be a multi-dimensional diffusion and drives the drift of the observation process, which is another multi-dimensional…