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Convex Q-learning is a recent approach to reinforcement learning, motivated by the possibility of a firmer theory for convergence, and the possibility of making use of greater a priori knowledge regarding policy or value function structure.…
Convergence of Q-learning has been the subject of extensive study for decades. Among the available techniques, the ordinary differential equation (ODE) method is particularly appealing as a general-purpose, off-the-shelf tool for…
For continuing tasks, average cost Markov decision processes have well-documented value and can be solved using efficient algorithms. However, it explicitly assumes that the agent is risk-neutral. In this work, we extend risk-neutral…
This paper develops a switching-system interpretation of Q-learning with linear function approximation (LFA) based on the joint spectral radius (JSR). We derive an exact linear switched model for the mean dynamics and relate convergence to…
Offline reinforcement learning (RL) aims at learning an optimal strategy using a pre-collected dataset without further interactions with the environment. While various algorithms have been proposed for offline RL in the previous literature,…
In this paper, for Markov decision processes (MDPs) with unbounded state spaces we present refined upper bounds presented in [Kara et. al. JMLR'23] on finite model approximation errors via optimizing the quantizers used for finite model…
Policy optimization, which finds the desired policy by maximizing value functions via optimization techniques, lies at the heart of reinforcement learning (RL). In addition to value maximization, other practical considerations arise as…
This paper studies the risk-averse mean-variance optimization in infinite-horizon discounted Markov decision processes (MDPs). The involved variance metric concerns reward variability during the whole process, and future deviations are…
Robust reinforcement learning (RRL) aims at seeking a robust policy to optimize the worst case performance over an uncertainty set of Markov decision processes (MDPs). This set contains some perturbed MDPs from a nominal MDP (N-MDP) that…
In the reinforcement learning literature, strong theoretical guarantees have been obtained for algorithms applicable to LTI systems. However, in the nonlinear case only weaker results have been obtained for algorithms that mostly rely on…
In this paper, we propose a reinforcement learning algorithm to solve a multi-agent Markov decision process (MMDP). The goal, inspired by Blackwell's Approachability Theorem, is to lower the time average cost of each agent to below a…
This paper studies systematic exploration for reinforcement learning with rich observations and function approximation. We introduce a new model called contextual decision processes, that unifies and generalizes most prior settings. Our…
The objective in this paper is to obtain fast converging reinforcement learning algorithms to approximate solutions to the problem of discounted cost optimal stopping in an irreducible, uniformly ergodic Markov chain, evolving on a compact…
We study a class of bilevel convex optimization problems where the goal is to find the minimizer of an objective function in the upper level, among the set of all optimal solutions of an optimization problem in the lower level. A wide range…
Interactive assessments generate sequential process data that are not well handled by conventional item response models. Existing MDP-based measurement approaches, such as the Markov decision process measurement model (MDP-MM, LaMar, 2018),…
In this paper, we provide a novel algorithm for solving planning and learning problems of Markov decision processes. The proposed algorithm follows a policy iteration-type update by using a rank-one approximation of the transition…
Q-learning with value function approximation may have the poor performance because of overestimation bias and imprecise estimate. Specifically, overestimation bias is from the maximum operator over noise estimate, which is exaggerated using…
To overcome the curses of dimensionality and modeling of Dynamic Programming (DP) methods to solve Markov Decision Process (MDP) problems, Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods are adopted in practice. Contrary to traditional RL algorithms…
This work presents the first finite-time analysis for the last-iterate convergence of average-reward $Q$-learning with an asynchronous implementation. A key feature of the algorithm we study is the use of adaptive stepsizes, which serve as…
In this article, we propose a novel regularization method for a class of nonlinear inverse problems that is inspired by an application in quantitative magnetic resonance imaging (qMRI). The latter is a special instance of a general…