Related papers: Matryoshka Policy Gradient for Entropy-Regularized…
We present a Pontryagin-Guided Direct Policy Optimization (PG-DPO) framework for Merton's portfolio problem, unifying modern neural-network-based policy parameterization with the adjoint viewpoint from Pontryagin's maximum principle (PMP).…
Many control problems in environments that can be modeled as Markov decision processes (MDPs) concern infinite-time horizon specifications. The classical aim in this context is to compute a control policy that maximizes the probability of…
Constrained Reinforcement Learning (RL) aims to maximize the return while adhering to predefined constraint limits, which represent domain-specific safety requirements. In continuous control settings, where learning agents govern system…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) has been used to finetune Large Language Models (LLMs) using a reward model trained from preference data, to better align with human judgment. The recently introduced direct alignment methods, which are often…
In this paper, we investigate a model-free optimal control design that minimizes an infinite horizon average expected quadratic cost of states and control actions subject to a probabilistic risk or chance constraint using input-output data.…
We consider the problem of learning the optimal policy for Markov decision processes with safety constraints. We formulate the problem in a reach-avoid setup. Our goal is to design online reinforcement learning algorithms that ensure safety…
We study the setting of \emph{performative reinforcement learning} where the deployed policy affects both the reward, and the transition of the underlying Markov decision process. Prior work~\parencite{MTR23} has addressed this problem…
This paper addresses the poor finite-horizon performance of existing online \emph{restless bandit} (RB) algorithms, which stems from the prohibitive sample complexity of learning a full \emph{Markov decision process} (MDP) for each agent.…
Motivated by penalized likelihood maximization in complex models, we study optimization problems where neither the function to optimize nor its gradient have an explicit expression, but its gradient can be approximated by a Monte Carlo…
Sample inefficiency is a long-lasting problem in reinforcement learning (RL). The state-of-the-art estimates the optimal action values while it usually involves an extensive search over the state-action space and unstable optimization.…
Trust region policy optimization (TRPO) is a popular and empirically successful policy search algorithm in Reinforcement Learning (RL) in which a surrogate problem, that restricts consecutive policies to be 'close' to one another, is…
Direct policy search serves as one of the workhorses in modern reinforcement learning (RL), and its applications in continuous control tasks have recently attracted increasing attention. In this work, we investigate the convergence theory…
Modern meta-reinforcement learning (Meta-RL) methods are mainly developed based on model-agnostic meta-learning, which performs policy gradient steps across tasks to maximize policy performance. However, the gradient conflict problem is…
We consider a constrained Markov Decision Problem (CMDP) where the goal of an agent is to maximize the expected discounted sum of rewards over an infinite horizon while ensuring that the expected discounted sum of costs exceeds a certain…
Stochastic and soft optimal policies resulting from entropy-regularized Markov decision processes (ER-MDP) are desirable for exploration and imitation learning applications. Motivated by the fact that such policies are sensitive with…
In order to compute near-optimal policies with policy-gradient algorithms, it is common in practice to include intrinsic exploration terms in the learning objective. Although the effectiveness of these terms is usually justified by an…
Wasserstein policy gradient (WPG) is a policy optimization method for reinforcement learning (RL) that exploits the optimal-transport geometry of action distributions. For the entropy-regularized RL objective, WPG evolves each…
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…
Entropic regularization of policies in Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a commonly used heuristic to ensure that the learned policy explores the state-space sufficiently before overfitting to a local optimal policy. The primary motivation for…
Robust Markov decision processes (MDPs) provide a general framework to model decision problems where the system dynamics are changing or only partially known. Efficient methods for some \texttt{sa}-rectangular robust MDPs exist, using its…