Related papers: Finite-Sample Analysis of the Monte Carlo Explorin…

Many potential applications of reinforcement learning (RL) are stymied by the large numbers of samples required to learn an effective policy. This is especially true when applying RL to real-world control tasks, e.g. in the sciences or…

We build on auto-encoding sequential Monte Carlo (AESMC): a method for model and proposal learning based on maximizing the lower bound to the log marginal likelihood in a broad family of structured probabilistic models. Our approach relies…

Iterative algorithms are ubiquitous in the field of data mining. Widely known examples of such algorithms are the least mean square algorithm, backpropagation algorithm of neural networks. Our contribution in this paper is an improvement…

Safe reinforcement learning (RL) aims to learn policies that satisfy certain constraints before deploying them to safety-critical applications. Previous primal-dual style approaches suffer from instability issues and lack optimality…

A recent theoretical analysis of a Monte-Carlo tree search (MCTS) method properly modified from the ``upper confidence bound applied to trees" (UCT) algorithm established a surprising result, due to a great deal of empirical successes…

While reinforcement learning has shown experimental success in a number of applications, it is known to be sensitive to noise and perturbations in the parameters of the system, leading to high variance in the total reward amongst different…

Monte Carlo methods are essential tools for Bayesian inference. Gibbs sampling is a well-known Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm, extensively used in signal processing, machine learning, and statistics, employed to draw samples from…

This paper provides a statistical analysis of high-dimensional batch Reinforcement Learning (RL) using sparse linear function approximation. When there is a large number of candidate features, our result sheds light on the fact that…

We construct a new framework for accelerating Markov chain Monte Carlo in posterior sampling problems where standard methods are limited by the computational cost of the likelihood, or of numerical models embedded therein. Our approach…

We consider the optimal sample complexity theory of tabular reinforcement learning (RL) for maximizing the infinite horizon discounted reward in a Markov decision process (MDP). Optimal worst-case complexity results have been developed for…

We introduce reinforcement learning for heterogeneous teams in which rewards for an agent are additively factored into local costs, stimuli unique to each agent, and global rewards, those shared by all agents in the domain. Motivating…

Restricted Boltzmann Machines are simple and powerful generative models that can encode any complex dataset. Despite all their advantages, in practice the trainings are often unstable and it is difficult to assess their quality because the…

We establish an optimal sample complexity of $O(\epsilon^{-2})$ for obtaining an $\epsilon$-optimal global policy using a single-timescale actor-critic (AC) algorithm in infinite-horizon discounted Markov decision processes (MDPs) with…

Estimating failure probabilities of engineering systems is an important problem in many engineering fields. In this work we consider such problems where the failure probability is extremely small (e.g $\leq10^{-10}$). In this case, standard…

Most prior work on active learning of classifiers has focused on sequentially selecting one unlabeled example at a time to be labeled in order to reduce the overall labeling effort. In many scenarios, however, it is desirable to label an…

We consider selecting the top-$m$ alternatives from a finite number of alternatives via Monte Carlo simulation. Under a Bayesian framework, we formulate the sampling decision as a stochastic dynamic programming problem, and develop a…

We study learning optimal policies from a logged dataset, i.e., offline RL, with function approximation. Despite the efforts devoted, existing algorithms with theoretic finite-sample guarantees typically assume exploratory data coverage or…

We study an optimal control problem under uncertainty, where the target function is the solution of an elliptic partial differential equation with random coefficients, steered by a control function. The robust formulation of the…

Safety is a fundamental challenge in reinforcement learning (RL), particularly in real-world applications such as autonomous driving, robotics, and healthcare. To address this, Constrained Markov Decision Processes (CMDPs) are commonly used…

Efficient sampling from constraint manifolds, and thereby generating a diverse set of solutions for feasibility problems, is a fundamental challenge. We consider the case where a problem is factored, that is, the underlying nonlinear…