Related papers: Near-Optimal Algorithms for Autonomous Exploration…
We consider a setting in which the objective is to learn to navigate in a controlled Markov process (CMP) where transition probabilities may abruptly change. For this setting, we propose a performance measure called exploration steps which…
We consider approximation or recovery of functions based on a finite number of function evaluations. This is a well-studied problem in optimal recovery, machine learning, and numerical analysis in general, but many fundamental insights were…
In this extended abstract, we report on ongoing work towards an approximate multimodal optimization algorithm with asymptotic guarantees. Multimodal optimization is the problem of finding all local optimal solutions (modes) to a path…
In this paper, we investigate an optimal control problem with terminal stochastic linear complementarity constraints (SLCC), and its discrete approximation using the relaxation, the sample average approximation (SAA) and the implicit Euler…
We describe an approximate dynamic programming approach to compute lower bounds on the optimal value function for a discrete time, continuous space, infinite horizon setting. The approach iteratively constructs a family of lower bounding…
This paper develops a fast numerical dual control for exploration and exploitation (DCEE) method to address auto-optimization problems in unknown environments. In auto-optimization problems, the optimal operating condition is unknown a…
Efficient exploration is a central problem in reinforcement learning and is often formalized as maximizing the entropy of the state-action occupancy measure. While unconstrained maximum-entropy exploration is relatively well understood,…
The restricted max-min fair allocation problem (also known as the restricted Santa Claus problem) is one of few problems that enjoys the intriguing status of having a better estimation algorithm than approximation algorithm. Indeed,…
This paper introduces a graph-based, potential-guided method for path planning problems in unknown environments, where obstacles are unknown until the robots are in close proximity to the obstacle locations. Inspired by optimal transport…
In this paper, further extensions of the result of the paper "A successive approximation method in functional spaces for hierarchical optimal control problems and its application to learning, arXiv:2410.20617 [math.OC], 2024" concerning a…
Exploration remains a key challenge in deep reinforcement learning (RL). Optimism in the face of uncertainty is a well-known heuristic with theoretical guarantees in the tabular setting, but how best to translate the principle to deep…
Motivated by applications where impatience is pervasive and evaluation times are uncertain, we study a selection model where options may expire at an unknown point in time and evaluation times are stochastic. Initially, the decision-maker…
Many popular reinforcement learning problems (e.g., navigation in a maze, some Atari games, mountain car) are instances of the episodic setting under its stochastic shortest path (SSP) formulation, where an agent has to achieve a goal state…
This paper considers an optimization problem for a dynamical system whose evolution depends on a collection of binary decision variables. We develop scalable approximation algorithms with provable suboptimality bounds to provide…
We analyze a simple randomized subgradient method for approximating solutions to stochastic systems of convex functional constraints, the only input to the algorithm being the size of minibatches. By introducing a new notion of what is…
This article presents a constrained policy optimization approach for the optimal control of systems under nonstationary uncertainties. We introduce an assumption that we call Markov embeddability that allows us to cast the stochastic…
This paper studies an optimal control problem for continuous-time stochastic systems subject to reachability objectives specified in a subclass of metric interval temporal logic specifications, a temporal logic with real-time constraints.…
During initial iterations of training in most Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms, agents perform a significant number of random exploratory steps. In the real world, this can limit the practicality of these algorithms as it can lead to…
We present a method for solving the coverage problem with the objective of autonomously exploring an unknown environment under mission time constraints. Here, the robot is tasked with planning a path over a horizon such that the accumulated…
Minimising the longest travel distance for a group of mobile robots with interchangeable goals requires knowledge of the shortest length paths between all robots and goal destinations. Determining the exact length of the shortest paths in…