Related papers: Parameterized Projected Bellman Operator
This paper studies value iteration for infinite horizon contracting Markov decision processes under convexity assumptions and when the state space is uncountable. The original value iteration is replaced with a more tractable form and the…
Model-free reinforcement learning algorithms combined with value function approximation have recently achieved impressive performance in a variety of application domains. However, the theoretical understanding of such algorithms is limited,…
We study tabular reinforcement learning problems with multiple steps of lookahead information. Before acting, the learner observes $\ell$ steps of future transition and reward realizations: the exact state the agent would reach and the…
Offline policy evaluation (OPE) is considered a fundamental and challenging problem in reinforcement learning (RL). This paper focuses on the value estimation of a target policy based on pre-collected data generated from a possibly…
The ever-increasing demands of computationally expensive and high-dimensional problems require novel optimization methods to find near-optimal solutions in a reasonable amount of time. Bayesian Optimization (BO) stands as one of the best…
To avoid myopic behavior, multi-step lookahead Bayesian optimization (BO) algorithms consider the sequential nature of BO and have demonstrated promising results in recent years. However, owing to the curse of dimensionality, most of these…
We consider a new family of operators for reinforcement learning with the goal of alleviating the negative effects and becoming more robust to approximation or estimation errors. Various theoretical results are established, which include…
This paper delves into an in-depth exploration of the Variable Projection (VP) algorithm, a powerful tool for solving separable nonlinear optimization problems across multiple domains, including system identification, image processing, and…
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models such as OpenVLA, Octo, and $\pi_0$ have shown strong generalization by leveraging large-scale demonstrations, yet their performance is still fundamentally constrained by the quality and coverage of…
Dexterous manipulation tasks often require switching between different contact modes, such as rolling, sliding, sticking, or non-contact contact modes. When formulating dexterous manipulation tasks as a trajectory optimization problem, a…
We propose a new family of policy gradient methods for reinforcement learning, which alternate between sampling data through interaction with the environment, and optimizing a "surrogate" objective function using stochastic gradient ascent.…
Advances in reinforcement learning (RL) often rely on massive compute resources and remain notoriously sample inefficient. In contrast, the human brain is able to efficiently learn effective control strategies using limited resources. This…
Q-value iteration (Q-VI) is usually analyzed through the \(\gamma\)-contraction of the Bellman operator. This argument proves convergence to \(Q^*\), but it gives only a coarse account of when the induced greedy policy becomes optimal. We…
The popularity of Bayesian Optimization (BO) to automate or support the commissioning of engineering systems is rising. Conventional BO, however, relies on the availability of a scalar objective function. The latter is often difficult to…
Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has emerged as a powerful framework for solving sequential decision-making problems, achieving remarkable success in a wide range of applications, including game AI, autonomous driving, biomedicine, and…
Aligning large-scale vision-language models (VLMs) for complex reasoning via reinforcement learning is often hampered by the limitations of existing policy optimization algorithms, such as static training schedules and the rigid, uniform…
This paper aims at theoretically and empirically comparing two standard optimization criteria for Reinforcement Learning: i) maximization of the mean value and ii) minimization of the Bellman residual. For that purpose, we place ourselves…
Bayesian Optimisation (BO) methods seek to find global optima of objective functions which are only available as a black-box or are expensive to evaluate. Such methods construct a surrogate model for the objective function, quantifying the…
There is tremendous scope for improving the energy efficiency of embedded vision systems by incorporating programmable region-of-interest (ROI) readout in the image sensor design. In this work, we study how ROI programmability can be…
The policy represented by the deep neural network can overfit the spurious features in observations, which hamper a reinforcement learning agent from learning effective policy. This issue becomes severe in high-dimensional state, where the…