Related papers: Model-Based Epistemic Variance of Values for Risk-…
We consider the problem of quantifying uncertainty over expected cumulative rewards in model-based reinforcement learning. In particular, we focus on characterizing the variance over values induced by a distribution over MDPs. Previous work…
We consider the exploration/exploitation problem in reinforcement learning. For exploitation, it is well known that the Bellman equation connects the value at any time-step to the expected value at subsequent time-steps. In this paper we…
Quantifying uncertainty about a policy's long-term performance is important to solve sequential decision-making tasks. We study the problem from a model-based Bayesian reinforcement learning perspective, where the goal is to learn the…
We study the off-policy evaluation (OPE) problem in reinforcement learning with linear function approximation, which aims to estimate the value function of a target policy based on the offline data collected by a behavior policy. We propose…
In online reinforcement learning, data scarcity creates epistemic uncertainty that makes robustness important early in learning, whereas sufficient exploration is needed to learn the true-environment optimal policy. We study this…
Robust Markov Decision Processes (RMDPs) intend to ensure robustness with respect to changing or adversarial system behavior. In this framework, transitions are modeled as arbitrary elements of a known and properly structured uncertainty…
We address the challenge of quantifying Bayesian uncertainty and incorporating it in offline use cases of finite-state Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) with unknown dynamics. Our approach provides a principled method to disentangle…
Offline reinforcement learning learns policies from fixed datasets without further environment interaction. A key challenge in this setting is epistemic uncertainty, arising from limited or biased data coverage, particularly when the…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) has gained substantial attention across diverse application domains and theoretical investigations. Existing literature on RL theory largely focuses on risk-neutral settings where the decision-maker learns to…
In robust Markov decision processes (MDPs), the uncertainty in the transition kernel is addressed by finding a policy that optimizes the worst-case performance over an uncertainty set of MDPs. While much of the literature has focused on…
Keeping risk under control is often more crucial than maximizing expected rewards in real-world decision-making situations, such as finance, robotics, autonomous driving, etc. The most natural choice of risk measures is variance, which…
We present the first finite-sample analysis of policy evaluation in robust average-reward Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). Prior work in this setting have established only asymptotic convergence guarantees, leaving open the question of…
Sequential decisions in volatile, high-stakes settings require more than maximizing expected return; they require principled uncertainty management. This paper presents the Uncertainty-Aware Markov Decision Process (UAMDP), a unified…
In reinforcement learning the Q-values summarize the expected future rewards that the agent will attain. However, they cannot capture the epistemic uncertainty about those rewards. In this work we derive a new Bellman operator with…
This dissertation makes three main contributions. First, We identify a new connection between policy gradient and dynamic programming in MMDPs and propose the Coordinate Ascent Dynamic Programming (CADP) algorithm to compute a Markov policy…
Current approaches to model-based offline reinforcement learning often incorporate uncertainty-based reward penalization to address the distributional shift problem. These approaches, commonly known as pessimistic value iteration, use Monte…
Addressing uncertainty is critical for autonomous systems to robustly adapt to the real world. We formulate the problem of model uncertainty as a continuous Bayes-Adaptive Markov Decision Process (BAMDP), where an agent maintains a…
Model-based reinforcement learning has the potential to be more sample efficient than model-free approaches. However, existing model-based methods are vulnerable to model bias, which leads to poor generalization and asymptotic performance…
Optimal probabilistic approach in reinforcement learning is computationally infeasible. Its simplification consisting in neglecting difference between true environment and its model estimated using limited number of observations causes…
Model-based reinforcement learning algorithms tend to achieve higher sample efficiency than model-free methods. However, due to the inevitable errors of learned models, model-based methods struggle to achieve the same asymptotic performance…