Related papers: Observational and Interventional Causal Learning f…
In the contextual linear bandit setting, algorithms built on the optimism principle fail to exploit the structure of the problem and have been shown to be asymptotically suboptimal. In this paper, we follow recent approaches of deriving…
Controller design faces a trade-off between robustness and performance, and the reliability of linear controllers has caused many practitioners to focus on the former. However, there is renewed interest in improving system performance to…
Negative controls are increasingly used to evaluate the presence of potential unmeasured confounding in observational studies. Beyond the use of negative controls to detect the presence of residual confounding, proximal causal inference…
We study the problem of reinforcement learning in infinite-horizon discounted linear Markov decision processes (MDPs), and propose the first computationally efficient algorithm achieving rate-optimal regret guarantees in this setting. Our…
This work pioneers regret analysis of risk-sensitive reinforcement learning in partially observable environments with hindsight observation, addressing a gap in theoretical exploration. We introduce a novel formulation that integrates…
We study the control of an \emph{unknown} linear dynamical system under general convex costs. The objective is minimizing regret vs. the class of disturbance-feedback-controllers, which encompasses all stabilizing…
Many real-world sequential decision-making problems can be formulated as optimal control with high-dimensional observations and unknown dynamics. A promising approach is to embed the high-dimensional observations into a lower-dimensional…
We present the OMG-CMDP! algorithm for regret minimization in adversarial Contextual MDPs. The algorithm operates under the minimal assumptions of realizable function class and access to online least squares and log loss regression oracles.…
This paper considers the distributed online convex optimization problem with time-varying constraints over a network of agents. This is a sequential decision making problem with two sequences of arbitrarily varying convex loss and…
We study the problems of offline and online contextual optimization with feedback information, where instead of observing the loss, we observe, after-the-fact, the optimal action an oracle with full knowledge of the objective function would…
We introduce causal Markov Decision Processes (C-MDPs), a new formalism for sequential decision making which combines the standard MDP formulation with causal structures over state transition and reward functions. Many contemporary and…
We consider the problem of nonstochastic control with a sequence of quadratic losses, i.e., LQR control. We provide an efficient online algorithm that achieves an optimal dynamic (policy) regret of $\tilde{O}(\text{max}\{n^{1/3}…
A major limitation of machine learning (ML) prediction models is that they recover associational, rather than causal, predictive relationships between variables. In high-stakes automation applications of ML this is problematic, as the model…
This article presents a dynamic regret analysis for stochastic model predictive control (SMPC) in linear systems with quadratic performance index and additive and multiplicative uncertainties. Under a finite support assumption, the problem…
Performing causal inference in observational studies requires we assume confounding variables are correctly adjusted for. G-computation methods are often used in these scenarios, with several recent proposals using Bayesian versions of…
The framework of online learning with memory naturally captures learning problems with temporal constraints, and was previously studied for the experts setting. In this work we extend the notion of learning with memory to the general Online…
Online reinforcement learning in infinite-horizon Markov decision processes (MDPs) remains less theoretically and algorithmically developed than its episodic counterpart, with many algorithms suffering from high ``burn-in'' costs and…
We present an optimistic Q-learning algorithm for regret minimization in average reward reinforcement learning under an additional assumption on the underlying MDP that for all policies, the time to visit some frequent state $s_0$ is finite…
Linear Quadratic Regulator (LQR) and Linear Quadratic Gaussian (LQG) control are foundational and extensively researched problems in optimal control. We investigate LQR and LQG problems with semi-adversarial perturbations and time-varying…
Upper Confidence Bound (UCB) algorithms are a widely-used class of sequential algorithms for the $K$-armed bandit problem. Despite extensive research over the past decades aimed at understanding their asymptotic and (near) minimax…