Related papers: A unified worst case for classical simplex and pol…
In stochastic dynamic environments, team Markov games have emerged as a versatile paradigm for studying sequential decision-making problems of fully cooperative multi-agent systems. However, the optimality of the derived policies is usually…
We develop a novel unified randomized block-coordinate primal-dual algorithm to solve a class of nonsmooth constrained convex optimization problems, which covers different existing variants and model settings from the literature. We prove…
We study policy optimization in an infinite horizon, $\gamma$-discounted constrained Markov decision process (CMDP). Our objective is to return a policy that achieves large expected reward with a small constraint violation. We consider the…
Optimal control problems are inherently hard to solve as the optimization must be performed simultaneously with updating the underlying system. Starting from an initial guess, Howard's policy improvement algorithm separates the step of…
In this paper, we consider a class of continuous-time, continuous-space stochastic optimal control problems. Building upon recent advances in Markov chain approximation methods and sampling-based algorithms for deterministic path planning,…
The Random-Facet algorithm of Kalai and of Matousek, Sharir and Welzl is an elegant randomized algorithm for solving linear programs and more general LP-type problems. Its expected subexponential time of $2^{\tilde{O}(\sqrt{m})}$, where $m$…
We present algorithms to effectively represent a set of Markov decision processes (MDPs), whose optimal policies have already been learned, by a smaller source subset for lifelong, policy-reuse-based transfer learning in reinforcement…
Integrated task and motion planning has emerged as a challenging problem in sequential decision making, where a robot needs to compute high-level strategy and low-level motion plans for solving complex tasks. While high-level strategies…
Consider the problem of minimizing functions that are Lipschitz and strongly convex, but not necessarily differentiable. We prove that after $T$ steps of stochastic gradient descent, the error of the final iterate is $O(\log(T)/T)$ with…
A recent theory shows that a multi-player decentralized partially observable Markov decision process can be transformed into an equivalent single-player game, enabling the application of \citeauthor{bellman}'s principle of optimality to…
Value iteration is a fundamental algorithm for solving Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). It computes the maximal $n$-step payoff by iterating $n$ times a recurrence equation which is naturally associated to the MDP. At the same time, value…
Markov automata combine non-determinism, probabilistic branching, and exponentially distributed delays. This compositional variant of continuous-time Markov decision processes is used in reliability engineering, performance evaluation and…
We derive a finite-sample probabilistic bound on the parameter estimation error of a system identification algorithm for Linear Switched Systems. The algorithm estimates Markov parameters from a single trajectory and applies a variant of…
In this paper we consider the problem of obtaining sharp bounds for the performance of temporal difference (TD) methods with linear function approximation for policy evaluation in discounted Markov decision processes. We show that a simple…
We take the first step in studying general sequential decision-making under two adaptivity constraints: rare policy switch and batch learning. First, we provide a general class called the Eluder Condition class, which includes a wide range…
We study the common generalization of Markov decision processes (MDPs) with sets of transition probabilities, known as robust MDPs (RMDPs). A standard goal in RMDPs is to compute a policy that maximizes the expected return under an…
We describe constructions of extended formulations that establish a certain relaxed version of the Hirsch conjecture and prove that if there is a pivot rule for the simplex algorithm for which one can bound the number of steps by a…
Policy optimization methods are popular reinforcement learning algorithms in practice. Recent works have built theoretical foundation for them by proving $\sqrt{T}$ regret bounds even when the losses are adversarial. Such bounds are tight…
We study the problem of how to construct a set of policies that can be composed together to solve a collection of reinforcement learning tasks. Each task is a different reward function defined as a linear combination of known features. We…
We address the problem of finding the optimal policy of a constrained Markov decision process (CMDP) using a gradient descent-based algorithm. Previous results have shown that a primal-dual approach can achieve an $\mathcal{O}(1/\sqrt{T})$…