Related papers: Near-Optimal Adversarial Reinforcement Learning wi…
We consider a stochastic lost-sales inventory control system with a lead time $L$ over a planning horizon $T$. Supply is uncertain, and is a function of the order quantity (due to random yield/capacity, etc). We aim to minimize the…
We study a variant of online convex optimization where the player is permitted to switch decisions at most $S$ times in expectation throughout $T$ rounds. Similar problems have been addressed in prior work for the discrete decision set…
We study the stochastic shortest path problem with adversarial costs and known transition, and show that the minimax regret is $\widetilde{O}(\sqrt{DT^\star K})$ and $\widetilde{O}(\sqrt{DT^\star SA K})$ for the full-information setting and…
Solving Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs) is hard. Learning optimal controllers for POMDPs when the model is unknown is harder. Online learning of optimal controllers for unknown POMDPs, which requires efficient…
Stochastic shortest path (SSP) is a well-known problem in planning and control, in which an agent has to reach a goal state in minimum total expected cost. In this paper we present the adversarial SSP model that also accounts for…
Reinforcement learning algorithms typically assume rewards to be sampled from light-tailed distributions, such as Gaussian or bounded. However, a wide variety of real-world systems generate rewards that follow heavy-tailed distributions. We…
We consider the framework of non-stationary Online Convex Optimization where a learner seeks to control its dynamic regret against an arbitrary sequence of comparators. When the loss functions are strongly convex or exp-concave, we…
Recently, there has been a surge in interest in safe and robust techniques within reinforcement learning (RL). Current notions of risk in RL fail to capture the potential for systemic failures such as abrupt stoppages from system failures…
We study optimal regret bounds for control in linear dynamical systems under adversarially changing strongly convex cost functions, given the knowledge of transition dynamics. This includes several well studied and fundamental frameworks…
In this work we consider a variant of adversarial online learning where in each round one picks $B$ out of $N$ arms and incurs cost equal to the $\textit{minimum}$ of the costs of each arm chosen. We propose an algorithm called Follow the…
Learning from human feedback plays an important role in aligning generative models, such as large language models (LLM). However, the effectiveness of this approach can be influenced by adversaries, who may intentionally provide misleading…
We consider the problem of reward maximization in the dueling bandit setup along with constraints on resource consumption. As in the classic dueling bandits, at each round the learner has to choose a pair of items from a set of $K$ items…
We study the adaptive control of an unknown linear system with a quadratic cost function subject to safety constraints on both the states and actions. The challenges of this problem arise from the tension among safety, exploration,…
We consider the problem of joint routing and scheduling in queueing networks, where the edge transmission costs are unknown. At each time-slot, the network controller receives noisy observations of transmission costs only for those edges it…
We study reinforcement learning (RL) with linear function approximation. For episodic time-inhomogeneous linear Markov decision processes (linear MDPs) whose transition probability can be parameterized as a linear function of a given…
Adversarial training has become the primary method to defend against adversarial samples. However, it is hard to practically apply due to many shortcomings. One of the shortcomings of adversarial training is that it will reduce the…
Heavy-tailed distributions naturally arise in several settings, from finance to telecommunications. While regret minimization under subgaussian or bounded rewards has been widely studied, learning with heavy-tailed distributions only gained…
In human-in-the-loop reinforcement learning or environments where calculating a reward is expensive, the costly rewards can make learning efficiency challenging to achieve. The cost of obtaining feedback from humans or calculating expensive…
This paper considers the stability of online learning algorithms and its implications for learnability (bounded regret). We introduce a novel quantity called {\em forward regret} that intuitively measures how good an online learning…
We study model-based reinforcement learning in an unknown finite communicating Markov decision process. We propose a simple algorithm that leverages a variance based confidence interval. We show that the proposed algorithm, UCRL-V, achieves…