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This paper studies satisfaction of temporal properties on unknown stochastic processes that have continuous state spaces. We show how reinforcement learning (RL) can be applied for computing policies that are finite-memory and deterministic…
Motivated by applications in risk-sensitive reinforcement learning, we study mean-variance optimization in a discounted reward Markov Decision Process (MDP). Specifically, we analyze a Temporal Difference (TD) learning algorithm with linear…
Training self-driving cars is often challenging since they require a vast amount of labeled data in multiple real-world contexts, which is computationally and memory intensive. Researchers often resort to driving simulators to train the…
Advances in mobile computing technologies have made it possible to monitor and apply data-driven interventions across complex systems in real time. Markov decision processes (MDPs) are the primary model for sequential decision problems with…
Reinforcement learning (RL) is a fundamental framework for sequential decision-making, in which an agent learns an optimal policy through interactions with an unknown environment. In settings with function approximation, many existing RL…
We present a framework to address a class of sequential decision making problems. Our framework features learning the optimal control policy with robustness to noisy data, determining the unknown state and action parameters, and performing…
This thesis concerns the use of reinforcement learning to train neural networks to aid in the design of public transit networks. The Transit Network Design Problem (TNDP) is an optimization problem of considerable practical importance.…
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…
Training reinforcement learning (RL) agents using scalar reward signals is often infeasible when an environment has sparse and non-Markovian rewards. Moreover, handcrafting these reward functions before training is prone to…
We study reward-free reinforcement learning (RL) with linear function approximation, where the agent works in two phases: (1) in the exploration phase, the agent interacts with the environment but cannot access the reward; and (2) in the…
Leveraging more test-time computation has proven to be an effective way to boost the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). Among various methods, the verify-and-improve paradigm stands out for enabling dynamic solution…
The use of deep neural networks as function approximators has led to striking progress for reinforcement learning algorithms and applications. Yet the knowledge we have on decision boundary geometry and the loss landscape of neural policies…
Planning plays an important role in the broad class of decision theory. Planning has drawn much attention in recent work in the robotics and sequential decision making areas. Recently, Reinforcement Learning (RL), as an agent-environment…
In this paper we consider the problem of how a reinforcement learning agent that is tasked with solving a sequence of reinforcement learning problems (a sequence of Markov decision processes) can use knowledge acquired early in its lifetime…
In e-commerce platforms such as Amazon and TaoBao, ranking items in a search session is a typical multi-step decision-making problem. Learning to rank (LTR) methods have been widely applied to ranking problems. However, such methods often…
We study Markov decision processes (MDPs), where agents have direct control over when and how they gather information, as formalized by action-contingent noiselessly observable MDPs (ACNO-MPDs). In these models, actions consist of two…
Multi-agent systems of large language models (LLMs) show promise for complex reasoning, but their effectiveness is often limited by fixed collaboration protocols. These frameworks typically focus on macro-level orchestration while…
A reinforcement learning approach to design optimised graded metamaterials for mechanical energy confinement and amplification is described. Through the proximal policy optimisation algorithm, the reinforcement agent is trained to optimally…
In the reinforcement learning literature, there are many algorithms developed for either Contextual Bandit (CB) or Markov Decision Processes (MDP) environments. However, when deploying reinforcement learning algorithms in the real world,…
Reinforcement learning is a framework for interactive decision-making with incentives sequentially revealed across time without a system dynamics model. Due to its scaling to continuous spaces, we focus on policy search where one…