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This note summarizes the optimization formulations used in the study of Markov decision processes. We consider both the discounted and undiscounted processes under the standard and the entropy-regularized settings. For each setting, we…
In recent years, reinforcement learning (RL) systems with general goals beyond a cumulative sum of rewards have gained traction, such as in constrained problems, exploration, and acting upon prior experiences. In this paper, we consider…
The goal of this paper is to analyze distributional Markov Decision Processes as a class of control problems in which the objective is to learn policies that steer the distribution of a cumulative reward toward a prescribed target law,…
In this paper, we consider an online distributed composite optimization problem over a time-varying multi-agent network that consists of multiple interacting nodes, where the objective function of each node consists of two parts: a loss…
To overcome the curse of dimensionality and curse of modeling in Dynamic Programming (DP) methods for solving classical Markov Decision Process (MDP) problems, Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms are popular. In this paper, we consider…
Recent advances in recommender systems have shown that user-system interaction essentially formulates long-term optimization problems, and online reinforcement learning can be adopted to improve recommendation performance. The general…
Experience replay is a core ingredient of modern deep reinforcement learning, yet its benefits in policy optimization are poorly understood beyond empirical heuristics. This paper develops a novel theoretical framework for experience replay…
In this paper we discuss policy iteration methods for approximate solution of a finite-state discounted Markov decision problem, with a focus on feature-based aggregation methods and their connection with deep reinforcement learning…
This paper investigates a class of optimal control problems associated with Markov processes with local state information. The decision-maker has only local access to a subset of a state vector information as often encountered in…
The rapid changes in the finance industry due to the increasing amount of data have revolutionized the techniques on data processing and data analysis and brought new theoretical and computational challenges. In contrast to classical…
In this paper, we provide a novel algorithm for solving planning and learning problems of Markov decision processes. The proposed algorithm follows a policy iteration-type update by using a rank-one approximation of the transition…
Maneuver decision-making can be regarded as a Markov decision process and can be address by reinforcement learning. However, original reinforcement learning algorithms can hardly solve the maneuvering decision-making problem. One reason is…
We study the regret of reinforcement learning from offline data generated by a fixed behavior policy in an infinite-horizon discounted Markov decision process (MDP). While existing analyses of common approaches, such as fitted $Q$-iteration…
A crucial problem in reinforcement learning is learning the optimal policy. We study this in tabular infinite-horizon discounted Markov decision processes under the online setting. The existing algorithms either fail to achieve regret…
We study offline reinforcement learning problems with a long-run average reward objective. The state-action pairs generated by any fixed behavioral policy thus follow a Markov chain, and the {\em empirical} state-action-next-state…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) remains a central optimisation framework in machine learning. Although RL agents can converge to optimal solutions, the definition of ``optimality'' depends on the environment's statistical properties. The…
Logarithmic score and information divergence appear in both information theory, statistics, statistical mechanics, and portfolio theory. We demonstrate that all these topics involve some kind of optimization that leads directly to the use…
Bregman divergences generalize measures such as the squared Euclidean distance and the KL divergence, and arise throughout many areas of machine learning. In this paper, we focus on the problem of approximating an arbitrary Bregman…
Reinforcement learning (RL) is currently one of the most prominent methods for optimizing dynamical systems, with breakthrough results across various fields. The framework is based on the concept of a Markov decision process (MDP), leading…
Primal-dual splitting involving proximity operators in order to be able to find some approximation to the minimizer for a general form of Tikhonov type functional is in the focus of this work. This approximation is produced by a pair of…