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Effective reinforcement learning requires a proper balance of exploration and exploitation defined by the dispersion of action distribution. However, this balance depends on the task, the current stage of the learning process, and the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-02 Paweł Wawrzyński , Wojciech Masarczyk , Mateusz Ostaszewski

Stochastic optimal control of dynamical systems is a crucial challenge in sequential decision-making. Recently, control-as-inference approaches have had considerable success, providing a viable risk-sensitive framework to address the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-22 Hany Abdulsamad , Sahel Iqbal , Adrien Corenflos , Simo Särkkä

This paper studies the performative policy learning problem, where agents adjust their features in response to a released policy to improve their potential outcomes, inducing an endogenous distribution shift. There has been growing interest…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-25 Qianyi Chen , Ying Chen , Bo Li

This paper investigates methods for estimating the optimal stochastic control policy for a Markov Decision Process with unknown transition dynamics and an unknown reward function. This form of model-free reinforcement learning comprises…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-06 Brandon Trabucco , Albert Qu , Simon Li , Ganeshkumar Ashokavardhanan

Transfer reinforcement learning aims to improve the sample efficiency of solving unseen new tasks by leveraging experiences obtained from previous tasks. We consider the setting where all tasks (MDPs) share the same environment dynamic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-08 Kaige Yang

We consider a piecewise deterministic Markov decision process, where the expected exponential utility of total (nonnegative) cost is to be minimized. The cost rate, transition rate and post-jump distributions are under control. The state…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2017-11-22 Xin Guo , Yi Zhang

We study the policy evaluation problem in multi-agent reinforcement learning, modeled by a Markov decision process. In this problem, the agents operate in a common environment under a fixed control policy, working together to discover the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-01-13 Thinh T. Doan , Siva Theja Maguluri , Justin Romberg

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has proven highly effective in addressing complex control and decision-making tasks. However, in most traditional RL algorithms, the policy is typically parameterized as a diagonal Gaussian distribution, which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-02 Ruijie Hao , Longfei Zhang , Yang Dai , Yang Ma , Xingxing Liang , Guangquan Cheng

We revisit the estimation bias in policy gradients for the discounted episodic Markov decision process (MDP) from Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) perspective. The objective is formulated theoretically as the expected returns discounted…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-13 Haoxuan Pan , Deheng Ye , Xiaoming Duan , Qiang Fu , Wei Yang , Jianping He , Mingfei Sun

We study off-dynamics Reinforcement Learning (RL), where the policy is trained on a source domain and deployed to a distinct target domain. We aim to solve this problem via online distributionally robust Markov decision processes (DRMDPs),…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-26 Zhishuai Liu , Pan Xu

Policy learning using historical observational data is an important problem that has found widespread applications. Examples include selecting offers, prices, advertisements to send to customers, as well as selecting which medication to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-13 Nian Si , Fan Zhang , Zhengyuan Zhou , Jose Blanchet

We provide performance guarantees for a variant of simulation-based policy iteration for controlling Markov decision processes that involves the use of stochastic approximation algorithms along with state-of-the-art techniques that are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-17 Anna Winnicki , R. Srikant

Average-reward Markov decision processes (MDPs) provide a foundational framework for sequential decision-making under uncertainty. However, average-reward MDPs have remained largely unexplored in reinforcement learning (RL) settings, with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-29 Juan Sebastian Rojas , Chi-Guhn Lee

This paper studies Markov Decision Processes under parameter uncertainty. We adapt the distributionally robust optimization framework, and assume that the uncertain parameters are random variables following an unknown distribution, and…

Systems and Control · Computer Science 2015-05-14 Pengqian Yu , Huan Xu

Domain randomization (DR) is a successful technique for learning robust policies for robot systems, when the dynamics of the target robot system are unknown. The success of policies trained with domain randomization however, is highly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-09-18 Melissa Mozifian , Juan Camilo Gamboa Higuera , David Meger , Gregory Dudek

Wireless systems resource allocation refers to perpetual and challenging nonconvex constrained optimization tasks, which are especially timely in modern communications and networking setups involving multiple users with heterogeneous…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2021-09-28 Hassaan Hashmi , Dionysios S. Kalogerias

This paper concerns the central issues of model robustness and sample efficiency in offline reinforcement learning (RL), which aims to learn to perform decision making from history data without active exploration. Due to uncertainties and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-01 Laixi Shi , Yuejie Chi

The curse of dimensionality is a widely known issue in reinforcement learning (RL). In the tabular setting where the state space $\mathcal{S}$ and the action space $\mathcal{A}$ are both finite, to obtain a nearly optimal policy with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-28 Bingyan Wang , Yuling Yan , Jianqing Fan

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a technique to learn the control policy for an agent that interacts with a stochastic environment. In any given state, the agent takes some action, and the environment determines the probability distribution…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-30 Gaurav Gupta , Chenzhong Yin , Jyotirmoy V. Deshmukh , Paul Bogdan

Many real-world decision-making problems face the off-dynamics challenge: the agent learns a policy in a source domain and deploys it in a target domain with different state transitions. The distributionally robust Markov decision process…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-26 Zhishuai Liu , Pan Xu