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Modern policy optimization methods roughly follow the policy mirror descent (PMD) algorithmic template, for which there are by now numerous theoretical convergence results. However, most of these either target tabular environments, or can…
This paper proposes GProp, a deep reinforcement learning algorithm for continuous policies with compatible function approximation. The algorithm is based on two innovations. Firstly, we present a temporal-difference based method for…
In the face of difficult exploration problems in reinforcement learning, we study whether giving an agent an object-centric mapping (describing a set of items and their attributes) allow for more efficient learning. We found this problem is…
The Bayes-Adaptive Markov Decision Process (BAMDP) formalism pursues the Bayes-optimal solution to the exploration-exploitation trade-off in reinforcement learning. As the computation of exact solutions to Bayesian reinforcement-learning…
In many real-world problems, the learning agent needs to learn a problem's abstractions and solution simultaneously. However, most such abstractions need to be designed and refined by hand for different problems and domains of application.…
Action abstractions restrict the number of legal actions available during search in multi-unit real-time adversarial games, thus allowing algorithms to focus their search on a set of promising actions. Optimal strategies derived from…
We revisit the finite time analysis of policy gradient methods in the one of the simplest settings: finite state and action MDPs with a policy class consisting of all stochastic policies and with exact gradient evaluations. There has been…
Policy-gradient methods have received increased attention recently as a mechanism for learning to act in partially observable environments. They have shown promise for problems admitting memoryless policies but have been less successful…
Planning in adversarial and uncertain environments can be modeled as the problem of devising strategies in stochastic perfect information games. These games are generalizations of Markov decision processes (MDPs): there are two…
We consider a Reinforcement Learning setup where an agent interacts with an environment in observation-reward-action cycles without any (esp.\ MDP) assumptions on the environment. State aggregation and more generally feature reinforcement…
While there is an extensive body of research analyzing policy gradient methods for discounted cumulative-reward MDPs, prior work on policy gradient methods for average-reward MDPs has been limited, with most existing results restricted to…
This paper develops the first policy gradient method with global optimality guarantee and complexity analysis for robust reinforcement learning under model mismatch. Robust reinforcement learning is to learn a policy robust to model…
The abstraction of dynamical systems is a powerful tool that enables the design of feedback controllers using a correct-by-design framework. We investigate a novel scheme to obtain data-driven abstractions of discrete-time stochastic…
We propose a novel hierarchical reinforcement learning framework for control with continuous state and action spaces. In our framework, the user specifies subgoal regions which are subsets of states; then, we (i) learn options that serve as…
Policy learning for partially observed control tasks requires policies that can remember salient information from past observations. In this paper, we present a method for learning policies with internal memory for high-dimensional,…
A key component of model-based reinforcement learning (RL) is a dynamics model that predicts the outcomes of actions. Errors in this predictive model can degrade the performance of model-based controllers, and complex Markov decision…
We reformulate the option framework as two parallel augmented MDPs. Under this novel formulation, all policy optimization algorithms can be used off the shelf to learn intra-option policies, option termination conditions, and a master…
We present new algorithms for computing and approximating bisimulation metrics in Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). Bisimulation metrics are an elegant formalism that capture behavioral equivalence between states and provide strong…
In this paper, we propose an efficient implementation of deep policy gradient method (PGM) for optimal control problems in continuous time. The proposed method has the ability to manage the allocation of computational resources, number of…
Robust reinforcement learning agents using high-dimensional observations must be able to identify relevant state features amidst many exogeneous distractors. A representation that captures controllability identifies these state elements by…