Related papers: Off-Policy Evaluation in Markov Decision Processes…
The Robust Regularized Markov Decision Process (RRMDP) is proposed to learn policies robust to dynamics shifts by adding regularization to the transition dynamics in the value function. Existing methods mostly use unstructured…
We consider off-policy temporal-difference (TD) learning in discounted Markov decision processes, where the goal is to evaluate a policy in a model-free way by using observations of a state process generated without executing the policy. To…
This paper studies a finite-horizon Markov decision problem with information-theoretic constraints, where the goal is to minimize directed information from the controlled source process to the control process, subject to stage-wise cost…
Motivated by practical applications where stable long-term performance is critical-such as robotics, operations research, and healthcare-we study the problem of distributionally robust (DR) average-reward reinforcement learning. We propose…
Evaluations of Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) methods are an integral part of scientific progress of the field. Beyond designing DRL methods for general intelligence, designing task-specific methods is becoming increasingly prominent for…
What are the functionals of the reward that can be computed and optimized exactly in Markov Decision Processes?In the finite-horizon, undiscounted setting, Dynamic Programming (DP) can only handle these operations efficiently for certain…
We propose and study a general framework for regularized Markov decision processes (MDPs) where the goal is to find an optimal policy that maximizes the expected discounted total reward plus a policy regularization term. The extant…
Reinforcement learning (RL) is currently one of the most prominent methods for optimizing dynamical systems, with breakthrough results across various fields. The framework is based on the concept of a Markov decision process (MDP), leading…
Large scale reinforcement learning has become a central tool for improving reasoning in large language models. At this scale, generation is often lagged or asynchronous, so updates are performed on data collected by older policies. This…
Robust Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) address environmental shift through distributionally robust optimization (DRO) by finding an optimal worst-case policy within an uncertainty set of transition kernels. However, standard DRO approaches…
A Markov Decision Process (MDP) is a popular model for reinforcement learning. However, its commonly used assumption of stationary dynamics and rewards is too stringent and fails to hold in adversarial, nonstationary, or multi-agent…
We provide performance guarantees for a variant of simulation-based policy iteration for controlling Markov decision processes that involves the use of stochastic approximation algorithms along with state-of-the-art techniques that are…
We study the problem of off-policy evaluation (OPE) in Reinforcement Learning (RL), where the aim is to estimate the performance of a new policy given historical data that may have been generated by a different policy, or policies. In…
We consider finite Markov decision processes (MDPs) with convex constraints and known dynamics. In principle, this problem is amenable to off-the-shelf convex optimization solvers, but typically this approach suffers from poor scalability.…
We show that on-policy policy gradient (PG) and its variance reduction variants can be derived by taking finite difference of function evaluations supplied by estimators from the importance sampling (IS) family for off-policy evaluation…
We study infinite-horizon average-reward constrained Markov decision processes (CMDPs) under the weakly communicating assumption. Our contributions are twofold. First, we establish strong duality for weakly communicating average-reward…
We consider the problem of offline reinforcement learning with model-based control, whose goal is to learn a dynamics model from the experience replay and obtain a pessimism-oriented agent under the learned model. Current model-based…
We consider the problem of off-policy evaluation in Markov decision processes. Off-policy evaluation is the task of evaluating the expected return of one policy with data generated by a different, behavior policy. Importance sampling is a…
Multi-task representation learning (MTRL) is an approach that learns shared latent representations across related tasks, facilitating collaborative learning that improves the overall learning efficiency. This paper studies MTRL for…
Doubly robust (DR) estimators guard against model misspecification but remain sensitive to weak covariate overlap. We show that trimming propensity scores reduces variance but eliminates double robustness. We introduce DR estimators that…