Related papers: Reinforcement Learning with Non-Cumulative Objecti…
In this paper the connection between stochastic optimal control and reinforcement learning is investigated. Our main motivation is to apply importance sampling to sampling rare events which can be reformulated as an optimal control problem.…
Reward is the driving force for reinforcement-learning agents. This paper is dedicated to understanding the expressivity of reward as a way to capture tasks that we would want an agent to perform. We frame this study around three new…
Inverse Reinforcement Learning infers a reward function from expert demonstrations, aiming to encode the behavior and intentions of the expert. Current approaches usually do this with generative and uni-modal models, meaning that they…
Lexicographic multi-objective problems, which impose a lexicographic importance order over the objectives, arise in many real-life scenarios. Existing Reinforcement Learning work directly addressing lexicographic tasks has been scarce. The…
We consider robust optimization problems, where the goal is to optimize in the worst case over a class of objective functions. We develop a reduction from robust improper optimization to Bayesian optimization: given an oracle that returns…
While reinforcement learning (RL) has the potential to enable robots to autonomously acquire a wide range of skills, in practice, RL usually requires manual, per-task engineering of reward functions, especially in real world settings where…
With the increasing need for handling large state and action spaces, general function approximation has become a key technique in reinforcement learning (RL). In this paper, we propose a general framework that unifies model-based and…
Many engineering problems have multiple objectives, and the overall aim is to optimize a non-linear function of these objectives. In this paper, we formulate the problem of maximizing a non-linear concave function of multiple long-term…
This work proposes an efficient batch algorithm for feature selection in reinforcement learning (RL) with theoretical convergence guarantees. To mitigate the estimation bias inherent in conventional regularization schemes, the first…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) serves as a versatile framework for sequential decision-making, finding applications across diverse domains such as robotics, autonomous driving, recommendation systems, supply chain optimization, biology,…
In this lecture, we present a general perspective on reinforcement learning (RL) objectives, where we show three versions of objectives. The first version is the standard definition of objective in RL literature. Then we extend the standard…
Learning to optimize has emerged as a powerful framework for various optimization and machine learning tasks. Current such "meta-optimizers" often learn in the space of continuous optimization algorithms that are point-based and…
Despite the numerous advances, reinforcement learning remains away from widespread acceptance for autonomous controller design as compared to classical methods due to lack of ability to effectively tackle the reality gap. The reliance on…
The optimal objective is a fundamental aspect of reinforcement learning (RL), as it determines how policies are evaluated and optimized. While total return maximization is the ideal objective in RL, discounted return maximization is the…
The Bellman equation and its continuous form, the Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman equation, are ubiquitous in reinforcement learning and control theory. However, these equations become intractable for high-dimensional or nonlinear systems. This…
The Reward-Biased Maximum Likelihood Estimate (RBMLE) for adaptive control of Markov chains was proposed to overcome the central obstacle of what is variously called the fundamental "closed-identifiability problem" of adaptive control, the…
Reinforcement learning with outcome-based feedback faces a fundamental challenge: when rewards are only observed at trajectory endpoints, how do we assign credit to the right actions? This paper provides the first comprehensive analysis of…
We consider the problem of reinforcement learning using function approximation, where the approximating basis can change dynamically while interacting with the environment. A motivation for such an approach is maximizing the value function…
In this paper, we study the optimal stopping problem in the so-called exploratory framework, in which the agent takes actions randomly conditioning on current state and an entropy-regularized term is added to the reward functional. Such a…
Exploration in reinforcement learning is a challenging problem: in the worst case, the agent must search for high-reward states that could be hidden anywhere in the state space. Can we define a more tractable class of RL problems, where the…