Related papers: DROP: Distributional and Regular Optimism and Pess…
The distributional reinforcement learning (RL) approach advocates for representing the complete probability distribution of the random return instead of only modelling its expectation. A distributional RL algorithm may be characterised by…
The Reward Prediction Error hypothesis proposes that phasic activity in the midbrain dopaminergic system reflects prediction errors needed for learning in reinforcement learning. Besides the well-documented association between dopamine and…
Reward models are central to both reinforcement learning (RL) with language models and inference-time verification. However, existing reward models often lack temporal consistency, leading to ineffective policy updates and unstable RL…
We consider un-discounted reinforcement learning (RL) in Markov decision processes (MDPs) under drifting non-stationarity, i.e., both the reward and state transition distributions are allowed to evolve over time, as long as their respective…
Many classic Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms rely on a Bellman operator, which involves an expectation over the next states, leading to the concept of bootstrapping. To introduce a form of pessimism, we propose to replace this…
A computational problem in biological reward-based learning is how credit assignment is performed in the nucleus accumbens (NAc). Much research suggests that NAc dopamine encodes temporal-difference (TD) errors for learning value…
In a broad class of reinforcement learning applications, stochastic rewards have heavy-tailed distributions, which lead to infinite second-order moments for stochastic (semi)gradients in policy evaluation and direct policy optimization. In…
This paper concerns the central issues of model robustness and sample efficiency in offline reinforcement learning (RL), which aims to learn to perform decision making from history data without active exploration. Due to uncertainties and…
Impressive results in natural language processing (NLP) based on the Transformer neural network architecture have inspired researchers to explore viewing offline reinforcement learning (RL) as a generic sequence modeling problem. Recent…
Model-based offline reinforcement learning (RL) has made remarkable progress, offering a promising avenue for improving generalization with synthetic model rollouts. Existing works primarily focus on incorporating pessimism for policy…
While Distributional Reinforcement Learning (DRL) methods have demonstrated strong performance in online settings, its success in offline scenarios remains limited. We hypothesize that a key limitation of existing offline DRL methods lies…
Recent progress in Large Language Model (LLM) reasoning is increasingly driven by the refinement of post-training loss functions and alignment strategies. However, standard Reinforcement Learning (RL) paradigms like Group Relative Policy…
Deep reinforcement learning (RL) has shown remarkable success in specific offline decision-making scenarios, yet its theoretical guarantees are still under development. Existing works on offline RL theory primarily emphasize a few trivial…
Symmetry is pervasive in robotics and has been widely exploited to improve sample efficiency in deep reinforcement learning (DRL). However, existing approaches primarily focus on spatial symmetries, such as reflection, rotation, and…
The goal of this paper is to study a distributed version of the gradient temporal-difference (GTD) learning algorithm for multi-agent Markov decision processes (MDPs). The temporal difference (TD) learning is a reinforcement learning (RL)…
A common optimization tool used in deep reinforcement learning is momentum, which consists in accumulating and discounting past gradients, reapplying them at each iteration. We argue that, unlike in supervised learning, momentum in Temporal…
We study a robust alternative to empirical risk minimization called distributionally robust learning (DRL), in which one learns to perform against an adversary who can choose the data distribution from a specified set of distributions. We…
Learning Markov decision processes (MDPs) in the presence of the adversary is a challenging problem in reinforcement learning (RL). In this paper, we study RL in episodic MDPs with adversarial reward and full information feedback, where the…
The dominating NLP paradigm of training a strong neural predictor to perform one task on a specific dataset has led to state-of-the-art performance in a variety of applications (eg. sentiment classification, span-prediction based question…
We consider the distributionally robust optimization (DRO) problem with spectral risk-based uncertainty set and $f$-divergence penalty. This formulation includes common risk-sensitive learning objectives such as regularized condition…