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Data acquisition efficiency is a central challenge in deploying reinforcement learning in business and healthcare operations, where interactions are costly, slow, and often involve humans in the loop. This paper develops a unified large…
Exogenous state variables and rewards can slow reinforcement learning by injecting uncontrolled variation into the reward signal. This paper formalizes exogenous state variables and rewards and shows that if the reward function decomposes…
A novel reinforcement learning scheme to synthesize policies for continuous-space Markov decision processes (MDPs) is proposed. This scheme enables one to apply model-free, off-the-shelf reinforcement learning algorithms for finite MDPs to…
Value-at-risk (VaR), also known as quantile, is a crucial risk measure in finance and other fields. However, optimizing VaR metrics in Markov decision processes (MDPs) is challenging because VaR is non-additive and the traditional dynamic…
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 consider large-scale Markov decision processes (MDPs) with an unknown cost function and employ stochastic convex optimization tools to address the problem of imitation learning, which consists of learning a policy from a finite set of…
We develop several provably efficient model-free reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms for infinite-horizon average-reward Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). We consider both online setting and the setting with access to a simulator. In the…
Motivated by applications in risk-sensitive reinforcement learning, we study mean-variance optimization in a discounted reward Markov Decision Process (MDP). Specifically, we analyze a Temporal Difference (TD) learning algorithm with linear…
This paper investigates value function approximation in the context of zero-sum Markov games, which can be viewed as a generalization of the Markov decision process (MDP) framework to the two-agent case. We generalize error bounds from MDPs…
We study episodic reinforcement learning in non-stationary linear (a.k.a. low-rank) Markov Decision Processes (MDPs), i.e, both the reward and transition kernel are linear with respect to a given feature map and are allowed to evolve either…
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…
The optimal objective is a fundamental aspect of reinforcement learning (RL), as it determines how policies are evaluated and optimized. While total return maximization is the ideal objective in RL, discounted return maximization is the…
Reinforcement learning studies how an agent should interact with an environment to maximize its cumulative reward. A standard way to study this question abstractly is to ask how many samples an agent needs from the environment to learn an…
This note re-visits the rolling-horizon control approach to the problem of a Markov decision process (MDP) with infinite-horizon discounted expected reward criterion. Distinguished from the classical value-iteration approach, we develop an…
Reinforcement learning usually assumes a given or sometimes even fixed environment in which an agent seeks an optimal policy to maximize its long-term discounted reward. In contrast, we consider agents that are not limited to passive…
Reinforcement learning in non-stationary environments is challenging due to abrupt and unpredictable changes in dynamics, often causing traditional algorithms to fail to converge. However, in many real-world cases, non-stationarity has some…
We develop several new algorithms for learning Markov Decision Processes in an infinite-horizon average-reward setting with linear function approximation. Using the optimism principle and assuming that the MDP has a linear structure, we…
Reinforcement learning is a framework for interactive decision-making with incentives sequentially revealed across time without a system dynamics model. Due to its scaling to continuous spaces, we focus on policy search where one…
We study reinforcement learning with function approximation for large-scale Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs) where the state space and observation space are large or even continuous. Particularly, we consider Hilbert…
We study the problem of deployment efficient reinforcement learning (RL) with linear function approximation under the \emph{reward-free} exploration setting. This is a well-motivated problem because deploying new policies is costly in…