Related papers: Policy Gradient With Serial Markov Chain Reasoning
Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a general framework concerned with an agent that seeks to maximize rewards in an environment. The learning typically happens through trial and error using explorative methods, such as epsilon-greedy. There are…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) has proven highly effective in addressing complex control and decision-making tasks. However, in most traditional RL algorithms, the policy is typically parameterized as a diagonal Gaussian distribution, which…
Reinforcement learning (RL) aims to estimate the action to take given a (time-varying) state, with the goal of maximizing a cumulative reward function. Predominantly, there are two families of algorithms to solve RL problems: value-based…
Deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) is remarkably effective in addressing sequential resource allocation problems in domains such as healthcare, public policy, and resource management. However, deep RL policies often lack transparency and…
We provide performance guarantees for a variant of simulation-based policy iteration for controlling Markov decision processes that involves the use of stochastic approximation algorithms along with state-of-the-art techniques that are…
Reinforcement learning (RL) is a framework to optimize a control policy using rewards that are revealed by the system as a response to a control action. In its standard form, RL involves a single agent that uses its policy to accomplish a…
In dynamic programming (DP) and reinforcement learning (RL), an agent learns to act optimally in terms of expected long-term return by sequentially interacting with its environment modeled by a Markov decision process (MDP). More generally…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) based methods have seen their paramount successes in solving serial decision-making and control problems in recent years. For conventional RL formulations, Markov Decision Process (MDP) and state-action-value…
Risk-sensitive reinforcement learning (RL) is crucial for maintaining reliable performance in high-stakes applications. While traditional RL methods aim to learn a point estimate of the random cumulative cost, distributional RL (DRL) seeks…
Reading comprehension (RC) is a challenging task that requires synthesis of information across sentences and multiple turns of reasoning. Using a state-of-the-art RC model, we empirically investigate the performance of single-turn and…
We observe that several existing policy gradient methods (such as vanilla policy gradient, PPO, A2C) may suffer from overly large gradients when the current policy is close to deterministic (even in some very simple environments), leading…
Social goods, such as healthcare, smart city, and information networks, often produce ordered event data in continuous time. The generative processes of these event data can be very complex, requiring flexible models to capture their…
Distributional reinforcement learning (RL) is a powerful framework increasingly adopted in safety-critical domains for its ability to optimize risk-sensitive objectives. However, the role of the discount factor is often overlooked, as it is…
Reinforcement learning (RL) is emerging as a powerful paradigm for enabling large language models (LLMs) to perform complex reasoning tasks. Recent advances indicate that integrating RL with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) allows LLMs…
This paper proves that the episodic learning environment of every finite-horizon decision task has a unique steady state under any behavior policy, and that the marginal distribution of the agent's input indeed converges to the steady-state…
In order to model risk aversion in reinforcement learning, an emerging line of research adapts familiar algorithms to optimize coherent risk functionals, a class that includes conditional value-at-risk (CVaR). Because optimizing the…
Constrained Reinforcement Learning (CRL) addresses sequential decision-making problems where agents are required to achieve goals by maximizing the expected return while meeting domain-specific constraints. In this setting, policy-based…
This paper describes a purely data-driven solution to a class of sequential decision-making problems with a large number of concurrent online decisions, with applications to computing systems and operations research. We assume that while…
We study behavior-regularized reinforcement learning (RL), where regularization toward a reference distribution (the dataset in offline RL or the base model in LLM RL finetuning) is essential to prevent value over-optimization caused by…
Policy gradient (PG) methods are successful approaches to deal with continuous reinforcement learning (RL) problems. They learn stochastic parametric (hyper)policies by either exploring in the space of actions or in the space of parameters.…