Related papers: Structure Matters: Dynamic Policy Gradient
We consider a planning problem where the dynamics and rewards of the environment depend on a hidden static parameter referred to as the context. The objective is to learn a strategy that maximizes the accumulated reward across all contexts.…
Solving general Markov decision processes (MDPs) is a computationally hard problem. Solving finite-horizon MDPs, on the other hand, is highly tractable with well known polynomial-time algorithms. What drives this extreme disparity, and do…
We consider infinite-horizon discounted Markov decision processes and study the convergence rates of the natural policy gradient (NPG) and the Q-NPG methods with the log-linear policy class. Using the compatible function approximation…
This paper investigates the motion planning of autonomous dynamical systems modeled by Markov decision processes (MDP) with unknown transition probabilities over continuous state and action spaces. Linear temporal logic (LTL) is used to…
We consider infinite-horizon $\gamma$-discounted (linear) constrained Markov decision processes (CMDPs) where the objective is to find a policy that maximizes the expected cumulative reward subject to expected cumulative constraints. Given…
In this paper, we propose a policy gradient method for confounded partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) with continuous state and observation spaces in the offline setting. We first establish a novel identification result…
Direct optimization is an appealing framework that replaces integration with optimization of a random objective for approximating gradients in models with discrete random variables. A$^\star$ sampling is a framework for optimizing such…
This paper studies a policy optimization problem arising from collaborative multi-agent reinforcement learning in a decentralized setting where agents communicate with their neighbors over an undirected graph to maximize the sum of their…
This paper investigates the optimization problem of an infinite stage discrete time Markov decision process (MDP) with a long-run average metric considering both mean and variance of rewards together. Such performance metric is important…
We study infinite-horizon Constrained Markov Decision Processes (CMDPs) with general policy parameterizations and multi-layer neural network critics. Existing theoretical analyses for constrained reinforcement learning largely rely on…
Many real-world decision-making problems face the off-dynamics challenge: the agent learns a policy in a source domain and deploys it in a target domain with different state transitions. The distributionally robust Markov decision process…
This paper studies the risk-averse mean-variance optimization in infinite-horizon discounted Markov decision processes (MDPs). The involved variance metric concerns reward variability during the whole process, and future deviations are…
We introduce a mesh-type approach for tackling discrete-time, finite-horizon Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) characterized by state and action spaces that are general, encompassing both finite and infinite (yet suitably regular) subsets of…
We consider the problem of designing sample efficient learning algorithms for infinite horizon discounted reward Markov Decision Process. Specifically, we propose the Accelerated Natural Policy Gradient (ANPG) algorithm that utilizes an…
Mathematical reasoning, a core ability of human intelligence, presents unique challenges for machines in abstract thinking and logical reasoning. Recent large pre-trained language models such as GPT-3 have achieved remarkable progress on…
Approximate dynamic programming is a popular method for solving large Markov decision processes. This paper describes a new class of approximate dynamic programming (ADP) methods- distributionally robust ADP-that address the curse of…
Policy Mirror Descent (PMD) is a popular framework in reinforcement learning, serving as a unifying perspective that encompasses numerous algorithms. These algorithms are derived through the selection of a mirror map and enjoy finite-time…
Despite its popularity in the reinforcement learning community, a provably convergent policy gradient method for continuous space-time control problems with nonlinear state dynamics has been elusive. This paper proposes proximal gradient…
We consider policy evaluation in infinite-horizon discounted Markov decision problems (MDPs) with infinite spaces. We reformulate this task a compositional stochastic program with a function-valued decision variable that belongs to a…
We introduce Dynamic Contextual Markov Decision Processes (DCMDPs), a novel reinforcement learning framework for history-dependent environments that generalizes the contextual MDP framework to handle non-Markov environments, where contexts…