Related papers: Sample Complexity of Nonparametric Off-Policy Eval…
Reinforcement learning holds the promise of enabling autonomous robots to learn large repertoires of behavioral skills with minimal human intervention. However, robotic applications of reinforcement learning often compromise the autonomy of…
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…
Off-policy evaluation of sequential decision policies from observational data is necessary in applications of batch reinforcement learning such as education and healthcare. In such settings, however, unobserved variables confound observed…
A convenient approach to optimally solving combinatorial optimization tasks is the Branch-and-Bound method. Its branching heuristic can be learned to solve a large set of similar tasks. The promising results here are achieved by the…
The recent work by Dong & Yang (2023) showed for misspecified sparse linear bandits, one can obtain an $O\left(\epsilon\right)$-optimal policy using a polynomial number of samples when the sparsity is a constant, where $\epsilon$ is the…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) has opened up new opportunities to enhance existing smart systems that generally include a complex decision-making process. However, modern RL algorithms, e.g., Deep Q-Networks (DQN), are based on deep neural…
Neuroevolution is an alternative to gradient-based optimisation that has the potential to avoid local minima and allows parallelisation. The main limiting factor is that usually it does not scale well with parameter space dimensionality.…
Large scale reinforcement learning has become a central tool for improving reasoning in large language models. At this scale, generation is often lagged or asynchronous, so updates are performed on data collected by older policies. This…
Despite the great empirical success of deep reinforcement learning, its theoretical foundation is less well understood. In this work, we make the first attempt to theoretically understand the deep Q-network (DQN) algorithm (Mnih et al.,…
This paper is concerned with constructing a confidence interval for a target policy's value offline based on a pre-collected observational data in infinite horizon settings. Most of the existing works assume no unmeasured variables exist…
In dynamic decision-making scenarios across business and healthcare, leveraging sample trajectories from diverse populations can significantly enhance reinforcement learning (RL) performance for specific target populations, especially when…
Offline reinforcement learning, wherein one uses off-policy data logged by a fixed behavior policy to evaluate and learn new policies, is crucial in applications where experimentation is limited such as medicine. We study the estimation of…
We study reinforcement learning under model misspecification, where we do not have access to the true environment but only to a reasonably close approximation to it. We address this problem by extending the framework of robust MDPs to the…
Data in real-world application often exhibit skewed class distribution which poses an intense challenge for machine learning. Conventional classification algorithms are not effective in the case of imbalanced data distribution, and may fail…
In temporal difference (TD) learning, off-policy sampling is known to be more practical than on-policy sampling, and by decoupling learning from data collection, it enables data reuse. It is known that policy evaluation (including…
We present a model-based offline reinforcement learning policy performance lower bound that explicitly captures dynamics model misspecification and distribution mismatch and we propose an empirical algorithm for optimal offline policy…
Q-functions are widely used in discrete-time learning and control to model future costs arising from a given control policy, when the initial state and input are given. Although some of their properties are understood, Q-functions…
Policy evaluation or value function or Q-function approximation is a key procedure in reinforcement learning (RL). It is a necessary component of policy iteration and can be used for variance reduction in policy gradient methods. Therefore…
Deep reinforcement learning techniques have demonstrated superior performance in a wide variety of environments. As improvements in training algorithms continue at a brisk pace, theoretical or empirical studies on understanding what these…
Effectively leveraging large, previously collected datasets in reinforcement learning (RL) is a key challenge for large-scale real-world applications. Offline RL algorithms promise to learn effective policies from previously-collected,…