Related papers: Learning Task Automata for Reinforcement Learning …
One of the key approaches to save samples in reinforcement learning (RL) is to use knowledge from an approximate model such as its simulator. However, how much does an approximate model help to learn a near-optimal policy of the true…
Many control tasks exhibit similar dynamics that can be modeled as having common latent structure. Hidden-Parameter Markov Decision Processes (HiP-MDPs) explicitly model this structure to improve sample efficiency in multi-task settings.…
We consider the problem of learning to behave optimally in a Markov Decision Process when a reward function is not specified, but instead we have access to a set of demonstrators of varying performance. We assume the demonstrators are…
In this thesis, we research learning algorithms for optimal decision making in two different contexts, Reinforcement Learning in Part I and Auction Design in Part II. Reinforcement learning (RL) is an area of machine learning that is…
Reinforcement learning (RL) often necessitates a meticulous Markov Decision Process (MDP) design tailored to each task. This work aims to address this challenge by proposing a systematic approach to behavior synthesis and control for…
We address the problem of reinforcement learning in which observations may exhibit an arbitrary form of stochastic dependence on past observations and actions, i.e. environments more general than (PO)MDPs. The task for an agent is to attain…
Many practical decision-making problems involve tasks whose success depends on the entire system history, rather than on achieving a state with desired properties. Markovian Reinforcement Learning (RL) approaches are not suitable for such…
Real-world decision-making problems are often partially observable, and many can be formulated as a Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP). When we apply reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms to the POMDP, reasonable…
Reinforcement learning (RL) methods usually treat reward functions as black boxes. As such, these methods must extensively interact with the environment in order to discover rewards and optimal policies. In most RL applications, however,…
In standard Reinforcement Learning (RL) settings, the interaction between the agent and the environment is typically modeled as a Markov Decision Process (MDP), which assumes that the agent observes the system state instantaneously, selects…
A Markov Decision Process (MDP) is a popular model for reinforcement learning. However, its commonly used assumption of stationary dynamics and rewards is too stringent and fails to hold in adversarial, nonstationary, or multi-agent…
This paper proposes DeepSynth, a method for effective training of deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents when the reward is sparse and non-Markovian, but at the same time progress towards the reward requires achieving an unknown sequence…
The Robust Markov Decision Process (RMDP) framework focuses on designing control policies that are robust against the parameter uncertainties due to the mismatches between the simulator model and real-world settings. An RMDP problem is…
We present a model-free reinforcement learning algorithm to find an optimal policy for a finite-horizon Markov decision process while guaranteeing a desired lower bound on the probability of satisfying a signal temporal logic (STL)…
Transfer reinforcement learning aims to improve the sample efficiency of solving unseen new tasks by leveraging experiences obtained from previous tasks. We consider the setting where all tasks (MDPs) share the same environment dynamic…
Due to limited resources and public safety concerns, deep reinforcement learning (RL) agents for many cyber-physical systems (e.g., autonomous vehicles) are first trained in simulators. However, when deployed in real world environments,…
Recurrent meta reinforcement learning (meta-RL) agents are agents that employ a recurrent neural network (RNN) for the purpose of "learning a learning algorithm". After being trained on a pre-specified task distribution, the learned weights…
In several reinforcement learning (RL) scenarios, mainly in security settings, there may be adversaries trying to interfere with the reward generating process. In this paper, we introduce Threatened Markov Decision Processes (TMDPs), which…
In this paper, we propose a reinforcement learning-based algorithm for trajectory optimization for constrained dynamical systems. This problem is motivated by the fact that for most robotic systems, the dynamics may not always be known.…
Reward function design and exploration time are arguably the biggest obstacles to the deployment of reinforcement learning (RL) agents in the real world. In many real-world tasks, designing a reward function takes considerable hand…