Related papers: On The Statistical Complexity of Offline Decision-…
We present on-line policy gradient algorithms for computing the locally optimal policy of a constrained, average cost, finite state Markov Decision Process. The stochastic approximation algorithms require estimation of the gradient of the…
The dynamic portfolio optimization problem in finance frequently requires learning policies that adhere to various constraints, driven by investor preferences and risk. We motivate this problem of finding an allocation policy within a…
Various algorithms in reinforcement learning exhibit dramatic variability in their convergence rates and ultimate accuracy as a function of the problem structure. Such instance-specific behavior is not captured by existing global minimax…
We study the problem of covert online decision-making in which an agent attempts to identify a parameter governing a system by probing the system while escaping detection from an adversary. The system is modeled as a Markov kernel whose…
Batch policy optimization considers leveraging existing data for policy construction before interacting with an environment. Although interest in this problem has grown significantly in recent years, its theoretical foundations remain…
This work provides a novel interpretation of Markov Decision Processes (MDP) from the online optimization viewpoint. In such an online optimization context, the policy of the MDP is viewed as the decision variable while the corresponding…
A frequently studied performance measure in online optimization is competitive analysis. It corresponds to the worst-case ratio, over all possible inputs of an algorithm, between the performance of the algorithm and the optimal offline…
We propose a novel gradient-based online optimization framework for solving stochastic programming problems that frequently arise in the context of cyber-physical and robotic systems. Our problem formulation accommodates constraints that…
Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs) provide a rich framework for sequential decision-making under uncertainty in stochastic domains. However, solving a POMDP is often intractable except for small problems due to their…
We consider a class of optimization problems over stochastic variables where the algorithm can learn information about the value of any variable through a series of costly steps; we model this information acquisition process as a Markov…
Subset selection for the rank $k$ approximation of an $n\times d$ matrix $A$ offers improvements in the interpretability of matrices, as well as a variety of computational savings. This problem is well-understood when the error measure is…
We investigate the problem of best policy identification in discounted linear Markov Decision Processes in the fixed confidence setting under a generative model. We first derive an instance-specific lower bound on the expected number of…
We study value adaptation in offline-to-online reinforcement learning under general function approximation. Starting from an imperfect offline pretrained $Q$-function, the learner aims to adapt it to the target environment using only a…
Off-policy learning is a framework for evaluating and optimizing policies without deploying them, from data collected by another policy. Real-world environments are typically non-stationary and the offline learned policies should adapt to…
We study offline dynamic pricing when historical data provide incomplete coverage of the price space such that some candidate prices, including the optimal one, may be entirely unobserved. This setting is common in practice and is…
We propose an estimator and confidence interval for computing the value of a policy from off-policy data in the contextual bandit setting. To this end we apply empirical likelihood techniques to formulate our estimator and confidence…
We present an approach towards convex optimization that relies on a novel scheme which converts online adaptive algorithms into offline methods. In the offline optimization setting, our derived methods are shown to obtain favourable…
Online imitation learning is the problem of how best to mimic expert demonstrations, given access to the environment or an accurate simulator. Prior work has shown that in the infinite sample regime, exact moment matching achieves value…
The goal in offline data-driven decision-making is synthesize decisions that optimize a black-box utility function, using a previously-collected static dataset, with no active interaction. These problems appear in many forms: offline…
We study the effectiveness of stochastic side information in deterministic online learning scenarios. We propose a forecaster to predict a deterministic sequence where its performance is evaluated against an expert class. We assume that…