Related papers: Provably Efficient Exploration in Reward Machines …
We consider Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) with deterministic transitions and study the problem of regret minimization, which is central to the analysis and design of optimal learning algorithms. We present logarithmic problem-specific…
Constrained Reinforcement Learning (CRL) is a subset of machine learning that introduces constraints into the traditional reinforcement learning (RL) framework. Unlike conventional RL which aims solely to maximize cumulative rewards, CRL…
Many sequential decision-making problems that are currently automated, such as those in manufacturing or recommender systems, operate in an environment where there is either little uncertainty, or zero risk of catastrophe. As companies and…
Reinforcement learning (RL) is a general framework for adaptive control, which has proven to be efficient in many domains, e.g., board games, video games or autonomous vehicles. In such problems, an agent faces a sequential decision-making…
We consider the setting of iterative learning control, or model-based policy learning in the presence of uncertain, time-varying dynamics. In this setting, we propose a new performance metric, planning regret, which replaces the standard…
Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) infers a reward function from demonstrations, allowing for policy improvement and generalization. However, despite much recent interest in IRL, little work has been done to understand the minimum set of…
The ability of reinforcement learning algorithms to learn effective policies is determined by the rewards available during training. However, for practical problems, obtaining large quantities of reward labels is often infeasible due to…
This paper presents a novel form of policy gradient for model-free reinforcement learning (RL) with improved exploration properties. Current policy-based methods use entropy regularization to encourage undirected exploration of the reward…
Recent work has demonstrated that problems-- particularly imitation learning and structured prediction-- where a learner's predictions influence the input-distribution it is tested on can be naturally addressed by an interactive approach…
In Reinforcement Learning (RL), it is commonly assumed that an immediate reward signal is generated for each action taken by the agent, helping the agent maximize cumulative rewards to obtain the optimal policy. However, in many real-world…
Dynamic mechanism design studies how mechanism designers should allocate resources among agents in a time-varying environment. We consider the problem where the agents interact with the mechanism designer according to an unknown Markov…
Despite rapid progress in theoretical reinforcement learning (RL) over the last few years, most of the known guarantees are worst-case in nature, failing to take advantage of structure that may be known a priori about a given RL problem at…
The Reward-Biased Maximum Likelihood Estimate (RBMLE) for adaptive control of Markov chains was proposed to overcome the central obstacle of what is variously called the fundamental "closed-identifiability problem" of adaptive control, the…
Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) is the problem of inferring a reward function from expert behavior. There are several approaches to IRL, but most are designed to learn a Markovian reward. However, a reward function might be…
We consider reinforcement learning for continuous-time Markov decision processes (MDPs) in the infinite-horizon, average-reward setting. In contrast to discrete-time MDPs, a continuous-time process moves to a state and stays there for a…
We initiate the study of multi-stage episodic reinforcement learning under adversarial corruptions in both the rewards and the transition probabilities of the underlying system extending recent results for the special case of stochastic…
Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a promising strategy for finetuning small language models (SLMs) to solve targeted tasks such as math and coding. However, RL algorithms tend to be resource-intensive, taking a significant amount…
Reward-free exploration is a reinforcement learning setting studied by Jin et al. (2020), who address it by running several algorithms with regret guarantees in parallel. In our work, we instead give a more natural adaptive approach for…
Reinforcement learning (RL) has shown empirical success in various real world settings with complex models and large state-action spaces. The existing analytical results, however, typically focus on settings with a small number of…
We consider online reinforcement learning in episodic Markov decision process (MDP) with unknown transition function and stochastic rewards drawn from some fixed but unknown distribution. The learner aims to learn the optimal policy and…