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Distributed learning has gained significant attention due to its advantages in scalability, privacy, and fault tolerance.In this paradigm, multiple agents collaboratively train a global model by exchanging parameters only with their…
We propose a new way of deriving policy gradient updates for reinforcement learning. Our technique, based on Fourier analysis, recasts integrals that arise with expected policy gradients as convolutions and turns them into multiplications.…
We consider the problem of scheduling in constrained queueing networks with a view to minimizing packet delay. Modern communication systems are becoming increasingly complex, and are required to handle multiple types of traffic with widely…
The goal of this paper is to analyze distributional Markov Decision Processes as a class of control problems in which the objective is to learn policies that steer the distribution of a cumulative reward toward a prescribed target law,…
Combining model-based and model-free reinforcement learning approaches, this paper proposes and analyzes an $\epsilon$-policy gradient algorithm for the online pricing learning task. The algorithm extends $\epsilon$-greedy algorithm by…
Gradient estimation -- approximating the gradient of an expectation with respect to the parameters of a distribution -- is central to the solution of many machine learning problems. However, when the distribution is discrete, most common…
This paper explores the application of the Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) algorithm within a Distributional Reinforcement Learning setting and introduces an implementation of such algorithm named Cram\'er-based Distributional Soft Actor-Critic…
Due to the high variance of policy gradients, on-policy optimization algorithms are plagued with low sample efficiency. In this work, we propose Augment-Reinforce-Merge (ARM) policy gradient estimator as an unbiased low-variance alternative…
We propose and analyze an alternate approach to off-policy multi-step temporal difference learning, in which off-policy returns are corrected with the current Q-function in terms of rewards, rather than with the target policy in terms of…
Diffusion policies trained via offline behavioral cloning have recently gained traction in robotic motion generation. While effective, these policies typically require a large number of trainable parameters. This model size affords powerful…
Direct optimization is an appealing framework that replaces integration with optimization of a random objective for approximating gradients in models with discrete random variables. A$^\star$ sampling is a framework for optimizing such…
Most bandit policies are designed to either minimize regret in any problem instance, making very few assumptions about the underlying environment, or in a Bayesian sense, assuming a prior distribution over environment parameters. The former…
We develop an online gradient algorithm for optimizing the performance of product-form networks through online adjustment of control parameters. The use of standard algorithms for finding optimal parameter settings is hampered by the…
We develop policy gradients methods for stochastic control with exit time in a model-free setting. We propose two types of algorithms for learning either directly the optimal policy or by learning alternately the value function (critic) and…
Policy gradients methods apply to complex, poorly understood, control problems by performing stochastic gradient descent over a parameterized class of polices. Unfortunately, even for simple control problems solvable by standard dynamic…
We study offline reinforcement learning problems with a long-run average reward objective. The state-action pairs generated by any fixed behavioral policy thus follow a Markov chain, and the {\em empirical} state-action-next-state…
Driven by the need to solve increasingly complex optimization problems in signal processing and machine learning, there has been increasing interest in understanding the behavior of gradient-descent algorithms in non-convex environments.…
We consider an improper reinforcement learning setting where a learner is given $M$ base controllers for an unknown Markov decision process, and wishes to combine them optimally to produce a potentially new controller that can outperform…
Offline reinforcement learning, wherein one uses off-policy data logged by a fixed behavior policy to evaluate and learn new policies, is crucial in applications where experimentation is limited such as medicine. We study the estimation of…
Current reinforcement learning objectives for large-model reasoning primarily focus on maximizing expected rewards. This paradigm can lead to overfitting to dominant reward signals, while neglecting alternative yet valid reasoning…