Related papers: On the connection between Bregman divergence and v…
In this paper we argue for the fundamental importance of the value distribution: the distribution of the random return received by a reinforcement learning agent. This is in contrast to the common approach to reinforcement learning which…
Euclidean Markov decision processes are a powerful tool for modeling control problems under uncertainty over continuous domains. Finite state imprecise, Markov decision processes can be used to approximate the behavior of these infinite…
This paper studies the statistical theory of batch data reinforcement learning with function approximation. Consider the off-policy evaluation problem, which is to estimate the cumulative value of a new target policy from logged history…
Recent theoretical work studies sample-efficient reinforcement learning (RL) extensively in two settings: learning interactively in the environment (online RL), or learning from an offline dataset (offline RL). However, existing algorithms…
Inverse reinforcement learning methods aim to retrieve the reward function of a Markov decision process based on a dataset of expert demonstrations. The commonplace scarcity and heterogeneous sources of such demonstrations can lead to the…
Offline reinforcement learning, which seeks to utilize offline/historical data to optimize sequential decision-making strategies, has gained surging prominence in recent studies. Due to the advantage that appropriate function approximators…
We investigate discrete-time mean-variance portfolio selection problems viewed as a Markov decision process. We transform the problems into a new model with deterministic transition function for which the Bellman optimality equation holds.…
The ability to exploit prior experience to solve novel problems rapidly is a hallmark of biological learning systems and of great practical importance for artificial ones. In the meta reinforcement learning literature much recent work has…
In this paper we propose a novel gradient algorithm to learn a policy from an expert's observed behavior assuming that the expert behaves optimally with respect to some unknown reward function of a Markovian Decision Problem. The…
Robust reinforcement learning (RL) aims to find a policy that optimizes the worst-case performance in the face of uncertainties. In this paper, we focus on action robust RL with the probabilistic policy execution uncertainty, in which,…
Building on the framework introduced by Xu and Raginksy [1] for supervised learning problems, we study the best achievable performance for model-based Bayesian reinforcement learning problems. With this purpose, we define minimum Bayesian…
In this paper, we consider the online proximal mirror descent for solving the time-varying composite optimization problems. For various applications, the algorithm naturally involves the errors in the gradient and proximal operator. We…
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…
Much of the recent success of deep reinforcement learning has been driven by regularized policy optimization (RPO) algorithms with strong performance across multiple domains. In this family of methods, agents are trained to maximize…
Markov decision processes (MDPs) are used to model a wide variety of applications ranging from game playing over robotics to finance. Their optimal policy typically maximizes the expected sum of rewards given at each step of the decision…
Traditional reinforcement learning (RL) assumes the agents make decisions based on Markov decision processes (MDPs) with one-step transition models. In many real-world applications, such as energy management and stock investment, agents can…
This paper studies function approximation for finite horizon discrete time Markov decision processes under certain convexity assumptions. Uniform convergence of these approximations on compact sets is proved under several sampling schemes…
Offline reinforcement learning (RL) aims to learn an effective policy from a static dataset. To alleviate extrapolation errors, existing studies often uniformly regularize the value function or policy updates across all states. However, due…
The analysis of Temporal Difference (TD) learning in the average-reward setting faces notable theoretical difficulties because the Bellman operator is not contractive with respect to any norm. This complicates standard analyses of…
Despite rapid progress in theoretical reinforcement learning (RL) over the last few years, most of the known guarantees are worst-case in nature, failing to take advantage of structure that may be known a priori about a given RL problem at…