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Warm-Start reinforcement learning (RL), aided by a prior policy obtained from offline training, is emerging as a promising RL approach for practical applications. Recent empirical studies have demonstrated that the performance of Warm-Start…
We look at a stochastic time-varying optimization problem and we formulate online algorithms to find and track its optimizers in expectation. The algorithms are derived from the intuition that standard prediction and correction steps can be…
This paper proposes an off-line algorithm, called Recurrent Model Predictive Control (RMPC), to solve general nonlinear finite-horizon optimal control problems. Unlike traditional Model Predictive Control (MPC) algorithms, it can make full…
Fine-tuning vision-language models (VLMs) with abundant unlabeled data recently has attracted increasing attention. Existing methods that resort to the pseudolabeling strategy would suffer from heavily incorrect hard pseudolabels when VLMs…
Uncertainties in transition dynamics pose a critical challenge in reinforcement learning (RL), often resulting in performance degradation of trained policies when deployed on hardware. Many robust RL approaches follow two strategies:…
In machine learning, model calibration and predictive inference are essential for producing reliable predictions and quantifying uncertainty to support decision-making. Recognizing the complementary roles of point and interval predictions,…
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…
Dynamic mechanism design has garnered significant attention from both computer scientists and economists in recent years. By allowing agents to interact with the seller over multiple rounds, where agents' reward functions may change with…
When using reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms to evaluate a policy it is common, given a large state space, to introduce some form of approximation architecture for the value function (VF). The exact form of this architecture can have a…
Model-based offline reinforcement learning (RL) aims to find highly rewarding policy, by leveraging a previously collected static dataset and a dynamics model. While the dynamics model learned through reuse of the static dataset, its…
A reliable deep learning system should be able to accurately express its confidence with respect to its predictions, a quality known as calibration. One of the most effective ways to produce reliable confidence estimates with a pre-trained…
Many reinforcement learning algorithms rely on value estimation, however, the most widely used algorithms -- namely temporal difference algorithms -- can diverge under both off-policy sampling and nonlinear function approximation. Many…
Actor-critic methods have achieved significant success in many challenging applications. However, its finite-time convergence is still poorly understood in the most practical single-timescale form. Existing works on analyzing…
In this paper, we propose a novel model-parallel learning method, called local critic training, which trains neural networks using additional modules called local critic networks. The main network is divided into several layer groups and…
Calibration$\unicode{x2014}$the problem of ensuring that predicted probabilities align with observed class frequencies$\unicode{x2014}$is a basic desideratum for reliable prediction with machine learning systems. Calibration error is…
We present an efficient and practical (polynomial time) algorithm for online prediction in unknown and partially observed linear dynamical systems (LDS) under stochastic noise. When the system parameters are known, the optimal linear…
In this paper, we consider the state estimation problem for nonlinear stochastic discrete-time systems. We combine Lyapunov's method in control theory and deep reinforcement learning to design the state estimator. We theoretically prove the…
Policy gradient algorithms have proven to be successful in diverse decision making and control tasks. However, these methods suffer from high sample complexity and instability issues. In this paper, we address these challenges by providing…
Offline (or batch) reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms seek to learn an optimal policy from a fixed dataset without active data collection. Based on the composition of the offline dataset, two main categories of methods are used:…
In this paper, we study the role of the critic in actor--critic for entropy-regularized, finite, discounted environments. We establish that, when the critic is exact, using the latter as a baseline is a variance-reduction method in a strong…