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Regularized Markov Decision Processes serve as models of sequential decision making under uncertainty wherein the decision maker has limited information processing capacity and/or aversion to model ambiguity. With functional approximation,…
We present the convergence rates of synchronous and asynchronous Q-learning for average-reward Markov decision processes, where the absence of contraction poses a fundamental challenge. Existing non-asymptotic results overcome this…
Q-learning, which seeks to learn the optimal Q-function of a Markov decision process (MDP) in a model-free fashion, lies at the heart of reinforcement learning. When it comes to the synchronous setting (such that independent samples for all…
As a primary contribution, we present a convergence theorem for stochastic iterations, and in particular, Q-learning iterates, under a general, possibly non-Markovian, stochastic environment. Our conditions for convergence involve an…
Safety in reinforcement learning has become increasingly important in recent years. Yet, existing solutions either fail to strictly avoid choosing unsafe actions, which may lead to catastrophic results in safety-critical systems, or fail to…
We study offline reinforcement learning (RL) in partially observable Markov decision processes. In particular, we aim to learn an optimal policy from a dataset collected by a behavior policy which possibly depends on the latent state. Such…
This work presents the first finite-time analysis for the last-iterate convergence of average-reward $Q$-learning with an asynchronous implementation. A key feature of the algorithm we study is the use of adaptive stepsizes, which serve as…
Few-shot learning is an important research field of machine learning in which a classifier must be trained in such a way that it can adapt to new classes which are not included in the training set. However, only small amounts of examples of…
We introduce the lookahead-bounded Q-learning (LBQL) algorithm, a new, provably convergent variant of Q-learning that seeks to improve the performance of standard Q-learning in stochastic environments through the use of ``lookahead'' upper…
In spite of the large literature on reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms for partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs), a complete theoretical understanding is still lacking. In a partially observable setting, the history of…
We study the offline reinforcement learning (offline RL) problem, where the goal is to learn a reward-maximizing policy in an unknown Markov Decision Process (MDP) using the data coming from a policy $\mu$. In particular, we consider the…
We present a probabilistic model for stochastic iterative algorithms with the use case of optimization algorithms in mind. Based on this model, we present PAC-Bayesian generalization bounds for functions that are defined on the trajectory…
We study reinforcement learning methods with linear function approximation under non-Markov state and cost processes. We first consider the policy evaluation method and show that the algorithm converges under suitable ergodicity conditions…
The compressive learning framework reduces the computational cost of training on large-scale datasets. In a sketching phase, the data is first compressed to a lightweight sketch vector, obtained by mapping the data samples through a…
Asynchronous distributed algorithms are a popular way to reduce synchronization costs in large-scale optimization, and in particular for neural network training. However, for nonsmooth and nonconvex objectives, few convergence guarantees…
Transfer reinforcement learning aims to derive a near-optimal policy for a target environment with limited data by leveraging abundant data from related source domains. However, it faces two key challenges: the lack of performance…
The $Q$-learning algorithm is a simple and widely-used stochastic approximation scheme for reinforcement learning, but the basic protocol can exhibit instability in conjunction with function approximation. Such instability can be observed…
We consider Markov Decision Problems defined over continuous state and action spaces, where an autonomous agent seeks to learn a map from its states to actions so as to maximize its long-term discounted accumulation of rewards. We address…
Adversarial machine learning concerns situations in which learners face attacks from active adversaries. Such scenarios arise in applications such as spam email filtering, malware detection and fake image generation, where security methods…
Stochastic optimization is a widely used approach for optimization under uncertainty, where uncertain input parameters are modeled by random variables. Exact or approximation algorithms have been obtained for several fundamental problems in…