Related papers: Safe Policy Improvement Approaches on Discrete Mar…
Preferences play a key role in determining what goals/constraints to satisfy when not all constraints can be satisfied simultaneously. In this paper, we study how to synthesize preference satisfying plans in stochastic systems, modeled as…
We consider (stochastic) softmax policy gradient (PG) methods for bandits and tabular Markov decision processes (MDPs). While the PG objective is non-concave, recent research has used the objective's smoothness and gradient domination…
Given a policy of a Markov Decision Process, we define a SafeZone as a subset of states, such that most of the policy's trajectories are confined to this subset. The quality of a SafeZone is parameterized by the number of states and the…
In reinforcement learning, robust policies for high-stakes decision-making problems with limited data are usually computed by optimizing the percentile criterion, which minimizes the probability of a catastrophic failure. Unfortunately,…
Recent successful deep reinforcement learning algorithms, such as Trust Region Policy Optimization (TRPO) or Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO), are fundamentally variations of conservative policy iteration (CPI). These algorithms iterate…
This paper concentrates on the reliability of a discrete-time controlled Markov system with finite states and actions, and aims to give an efficient algorithm for obtaining an optimal (control) policy that makes the system have the maximal…
We study the policy testing problem in discounted Markov decision processes (MDPs) in the fixed-confidence setting under a generative model with static sampling. The goal is to decide whether the value of a given policy exceeds a specified…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms have shown tremendous success in simulation environments, but their application to real-world problems faces significant challenges, with safety being a major concern. In particular, enforcing…
Incorporating safety is an essential prerequisite for broadening the practical applications of reinforcement learning in real-world scenarios. To tackle this challenge, Constrained Markov Decision Processes (CMDPs) are leveraged, which…
This paper investigates a type of instability that is linked to the greedy policy improvement in approximated reinforcement learning. We show empirically that non-deterministic policy improvement can stabilize methods like LSPI by…
The automatic synthesis of a policy through reinforcement learning (RL) from a given set of formal requirements depends on the construction of a reward signal and consists of the iterative application of many policy-improvement steps. The…
In this work, we focus on the problem of safe policy transfer in reinforcement learning: we seek to leverage existing policies when learning a new task with specified constraints. This problem is important for safety-critical applications…
This paper addresses the problem of model-free reinforcement learning for Robust Markov Decision Process (RMDP) with large state spaces. The goal of the RMDP framework is to find a policy that is robust against the parameter uncertainties…
Policy Gradient (PG) algorithms are among the best candidates for the much-anticipated applications of reinforcement learning to real-world control tasks, such as robotics. However, the trial-and-error nature of these methods poses safety…
We study continuous action reinforcement learning problems in which it is crucial that the agent interacts with the environment only through safe policies, i.e.,~policies that do not take the agent to undesirable situations. We formulate…
This brief paper presents simple simulation-based algorithms for obtaining an approximately optimal policy in a given finite set in large finite constrained Markov decision processes. The algorithms are adapted from playing strategies for…
The question of knowing whether the policy Iteration algorithm (PI) for solving Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) has exponential or (strongly) polynomial complexity has attracted much attention in the last 50 years. Recently, Fearnley…
We consider approximate dynamic programming for the infinite-horizon stationary $\gamma$-discounted optimal control problem formalized by Markov Decision Processes. While in the exact case it is known that there always exists an optimal…
We propose a Safe Pontryagin Differentiable Programming (Safe PDP) methodology, which establishes a theoretical and algorithmic framework to solve a broad class of safety-critical learning and control tasks -- problems that require the…
Safe exploration is a key to applying reinforcement learning (RL) in safety-critical systems. Existing safe exploration methods guaranteed safety under the assumption of regularity, and it has been difficult to apply them to large-scale…