Related papers: Beyond dynamic programming
To overcome the curse of dimensionality and curse of modeling in Dynamic Programming (DP) methods for solving classical Markov Decision Process (MDP) problems, Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms are popular. In this paper, we consider…
Guided policy search algorithms have been proven to work with incredible accuracy for not only controlling a complicated dynamical system, but also learning optimal policies from various unseen instances. One assumes true nature of the…
We propose a new method in indefinite-horizon settings for estimating optimal dynamic treatment regimes for time-to-event outcomes. This method allows patients to have different numbers of treatment stages and is constructed using…
Mastering complex sequential tasks continues to pose a significant challenge in robotics. While there has been progress in learning long-horizon manipulation tasks, most existing approaches lack rigorous mathematical guarantees for ensuring…
Reinforcement learning algorithms such as the deep deterministic policy gradient algorithm (DDPG) has been widely used in continuous control tasks. However, the model-free DDPG algorithm suffers from high sample complexity. In this paper we…
In this paper we develop a unified approach for solving a wide class of sequential selection problems. This class includes, but is not limited to, selection problems with no-information, rank-dependent rewards, and considers both fixed as…
We analyze the infinite horizon minimax average cost Markov Control Model (MCM), for a class of controlled process conditional distributions, which belong to a ball, with respect to total variation distance metric, centered at a known…
Continuous-time stochastic processes underlie many natural and engineered systems. In healthcare, autonomous driving, and industrial control, direct interaction with the environment is often unsafe or impractical, motivating offline…
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…
In lifelong learning, an agent learns throughout its entire life without resets, in a constantly changing environment, as we humans do. Consequently, lifelong learning comes with a plethora of research problems such as continual domain…
Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) addresses the problem of recovering a task description given a demonstration of the optimal policy used to solve such a task. The optimal policy is usually provided by an expert or teacher, making IRL…
Many learning algorithms are formulated in terms of finding model parameters which minimize a data-fitting loss function plus a regularizer. When the regularizer involves the l0 pseudo-norm, the resulting regularization path consists of a…
Computing an optimal classification tree that provably maximizes training performance within a given size limit, is NP-hard, and in practice, most state-of-the-art methods do not scale beyond computing optimal trees of depth three.…
In continual RL we want agents capable of never-ending learning, and yet our evaluation methodologies do not reflect this. The standard practice in RL is to assume unfettered access to the deployment environment for the full lifetime of the…
This work investigates the formal policy synthesis of continuous-state stochastic dynamic systems given high-level specifications in linear temporal logic. To learn an optimal policy that maximizes the satisfaction probability, we take a…
Off-policy evaluation (OPE) in reinforcement learning is an important problem in settings where experimentation is limited, such as education and healthcare. But, in these very same settings, observed actions are often confounded by…
We consider both discrete and continuous "uncertain horizon" deterministic control processes, for which the termination time is a random variable. We examine the dynamic programming equations for the value function of such processes,…
In this paper we propose an on-line policy iteration (PI) algorithm for finite-state infinite horizon discounted dynamic programming, whereby the policy improvement operation is done on-line, only for the states that are encountered during…
This work presents a novel policy iteration algorithm to tackle nonzero-sum stochastic impulse games arising naturally in many applications. Despite the obvious impact of solving such problems, there are no suitable numerical methods…
Program optimization is the process of modifying software to execute more efficiently. Superoptimizers attempt to find the optimal program by employing significantly more expensive search and constraint solving techniques. Generally, these…