Related papers: Towards Principled, Practical Policy Gradient for …
This paper proposes a new algorithm, referred to as GMAB, that combines concepts from the reinforcement learning domain of multi-armed bandits and random search strategies from the domain of genetic algorithms to solve discrete stochastic…
Policy-gradient methods are widely used for learning control policies. They can be easily distributed to multiple workers and reach state-of-the-art results in many domains. Unfortunately, they exhibit large variance and subsequently suffer…
We adopt an optimal-control framework for addressing the undiscounted infinite-horizon discrete-time restless $N$-armed bandit problem. Unlike most studies that rely on constructing policies based on the relaxed single-armed Markov Decision…
This paper studies how a stochastic gradient algorithm (SG) can be controlled to hide the estimate of the local stationary point from an eavesdropper. Such problems are of significant interest in distributed optimization settings like…
Recently, bandit optimization has received significant attention in real-world safety-critical systems that involve repeated interactions with humans. While there exist various algorithms with performance guarantees in the literature,…
The canonical solution methodology for finite constrained Markov decision processes (CMDPs), where the objective is to maximize the expected infinite-horizon discounted rewards subject to the expected infinite-horizon discounted costs…
An algorithm is proposed to solve robust control problems constrained by partial differential equations with uncertain coefficients, based on the so-called MG/OPT framework. The levels in this MG/OPT hierarchy correspond to discretization…
Projected subgradient descent (PSD) has gained popularity for solving robust Markov decision processes (RMDPs) because it applies to a broader class of uncertainty sets than traditional dynamic programming. Existing work claims that RMDPs…
One often encounters the curse of dimensionality in the application of dynamic programming to determine optimal policies for controlled Markov chains. In this paper, we provide a method to construct sub-optimal policies along with a bound…
Stochastic-gradient-based optimization has been a core enabling methodology in applications to large-scale problems in machine learning and related areas. Despite the progress, the gap between theory and practice remains significant, with…
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…
In this paper, we consider reinforcement learning of Markov Decision Processes (MDP) with peak constraints, where an agent chooses a policy to optimize an objective and at the same time satisfy additional constraints. The agent has to take…
During initial iterations of training in most Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms, agents perform a significant number of random exploratory steps. In the real world, this can limit the practicality of these algorithms as it can lead to…
In a typical stochastic multi-armed bandit problem, the objective is often to maximize the expected sum of rewards over some time horizon $T$. While the choice of a strategy that accomplishes that is optimal with no additional information,…
We consider the problem of finding the best memoryless stochastic policy for an infinite-horizon partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP) with finite state and action spaces with respect to either the discounted or mean reward…
A tenet of reinforcement learning is that the agent always observes rewards. However, this is not true in many realistic settings, e.g., a human observer may not always be available to provide rewards, sensors may be limited or…
This paper studies the computation of robust deterministic policies for Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) in the Lightning Does Not Strike Twice (LDST) model of Mannor, Mebel and Xu (ICML '12). In this model, designed to provide robustness…
Designing a safe policy for uncertain environments is crucial in real-world control systems. However, this challenge remains inadequately addressed within the Markov decision process (MDP) framework. This paper presents the first algorithm…
We develop a generic policy gradient method with the global optimality guarantee for robust Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). While policy gradient methods are widely used for solving dynamic decision problems due to their scalable and…
This paper addresses the problem of optimal control of robotic sensing systems aimed at autonomous information gathering in scenarios such as environmental monitoring, search and rescue, and surveillance and reconnaissance. The information…