Related papers: Towards Minimax Optimality of Model-based Robust R…
This paper studies an online learning problem that seeks optimal testing policies for a stream of subjects, each of whom can be evaluated through a sequence of candidate tests drawn from a common pool. We refer to this problem as the Online…
Risk-sensitive planning aims to identify policies maximizing some tail-focused metrics in Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). Such an optimization task can be very costly for the most widely used and interpretable metrics such as threshold…
We consider online reinforcement learning in episodic Markov decision process (MDP) with unknown transition function and stochastic rewards drawn from some fixed but unknown distribution. The learner aims to learn the optimal policy and…
We study offline reinforcement learning under a novel model called strategic MDP, which characterizes the strategic interactions between a principal and a sequence of myopic agents with private types. Due to the bilevel structure and…
We study reinforcement learning (RL) with linear function approximation where the underlying transition probability kernel of the Markov decision process (MDP) is a linear mixture model (Jia et al., 2020; Ayoub et al., 2020; Zhou et al.,…
We investigate Learning from Label Proportions (LLP), a partial information setting where examples in a training set are grouped into bags, and only aggregate label values in each bag are available. Despite the partial observability, the…
A tenet of reinforcement learning is that the agent always observes rewards. However, this is not true in many realistic settings, e.g., a human observer may not always be available to provide rewards, sensors may be limited or…
For the problem of task-agnostic reinforcement learning (RL), an agent first collects samples from an unknown environment without the supervision of reward signals, then is revealed with a reward and is asked to compute a corresponding…
Efficient global optimization is a widely used method for optimizing expensive black-box functions such as tuning hyperparameter, and designing new material, etc. Despite its popularity, less attention has been paid to analyzing the…
The problem of population recovery refers to estimating a distribution based on incomplete or corrupted samples. Consider a random poll of sample size $n$ conducted on a population of individuals, where each pollee is asked to answer $d$…
Partial observability is a common challenge in many reinforcement learning applications, which requires an agent to maintain memory, infer latent states, and integrate this past information into exploration. This challenge leads to a number…
We study the sample complexity of the plug-in approach for learning $\varepsilon$-optimal policies in average-reward Markov decision processes (MDPs) with a generative model. The plug-in approach constructs a model estimate then computes an…
We study reinforcement learning under model misspecification, where we do not have access to the true environment but only to a reasonably close approximation to it. We address this problem by extending the framework of robust MDPs to the…
Robust reinforcement learning is essential for deploying reinforcement learning algorithms in real-world scenarios where environmental uncertainty predominates. Traditional robust reinforcement learning often depends on rectangularity…
Robust Markov decision processes (MDPs) address the challenge of model uncertainty by optimizing the worst-case performance over an uncertainty set of MDPs. In this paper, we focus on the robust average-reward MDPs under the model-free…
Robust POMDPs extend classical POMDPs to incorporate model uncertainty using so-called uncertainty sets on the transition and observation functions, effectively defining ranges of probabilities. Policies for robust POMDPs must be (1)…
We investigate the problems of model estimation and reward-free learning in episodic Block MDPs. In these MDPs, the decision maker has access to rich observations or contexts generated from a small number of latent states. We are first…
We study the policy testing problem in discounted Markov decision processes (MDPs) in the fixed-confidence setting under a generative model with static sampling. The goal is to decide whether the value of a given policy exceeds a specified…
Partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) model specific environments in sequential decision-making under uncertainty. Critically, optimal policies for POMDPs may not be robust against perturbations in the environment.…
We present an efficient robust value iteration for \texttt{s}-rectangular robust Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) with a time complexity comparable to standard (non-robust) MDPs which is significantly faster than any existing method. We do…