Related papers: Adaptive Exploration for Multi-Reward Multi-Policy…
Markov decision processes (MDPs) are widely used in modeling decision making problems in stochastic environments. However, precise specification of the reward functions in MDPs is often very difficult. Recent approaches have focused on…
We apply control theoretic and optimization techniques to adaptively design incentives. In particular, we consider the problem of a planner with an objective that depends on data from strategic decision makers. The planner does not know the…
Reward function is essential in reinforcement learning (RL), serving as the guiding signal to incentivize agents to solve given tasks, however, is also notoriously difficult to design. In many cases, only imperfect rewards are available,…
Real-world recommender systems often need to balance multiple objectives when deciding which recommendations to present to users. These include behavioural signals (e.g. clicks, shares, dwell time), as well as broader objectives (e.g.…
Exploration in reinforcement learning (RL) remains an open challenge. RL algorithms rely on observing rewards to train the agent, and if informative rewards are sparse the agent learns slowly or may not learn at all. To improve exploration…
Learning optimal policies in sparse rewards settings is difficult as the learning agent has little to no feedback on the quality of its actions. In these situations, a good strategy is to focus on exploration, hopefully leading to the…
We study the problem of deployment efficient reinforcement learning (RL) with linear function approximation under the \emph{reward-free} exploration setting. This is a well-motivated problem because deploying new policies is costly in…
While standard reinforcement learning optimizes a single reward signal, many applications require optimizing a nonlinear utility $f(J_1^\pi,\dots,J_M^\pi)$ over multiple objectives, where each $J_m^\pi$ denotes the expected discounted…
This paper addresses the problem of optimal control of robotic sensing systems aimed at autonomous information gathering in scenarios such as environmental monitoring, search and rescue, and surveillance and reconnaissance. The information…
Recent years have witnessed a tremendous improvement of deep reinforcement learning. However, a challenging problem is that an agent may suffer from inefficient exploration, particularly for on-policy methods. Previous exploration methods…
Binary optimization has a wide range of applications in combinatorial optimization problems such as MaxCut, MIMO detection, and MaxSAT. However, these problems are typically NP-hard due to the binary constraints. We develop a novel…
Exploration is a major challenge in reinforcement learning, especially for high-dimensional domains that require function approximation. We propose exploration objectives -- policy optimization objectives that enable downstream maximization…
Reinforcement learning with sparse rewards is challenging because an agent can rarely obtain non-zero rewards and hence, gradient-based optimization of parameterized policies can be incremental and slow. Recent work demonstrated that using…
We propose policy gradient algorithms for solving a risk-sensitive reinforcement learning (RL) problem in on-policy as well as off-policy settings. We consider episodic Markov decision processes, and model the risk using the broad class of…
Exploration efficiency is a challenging problem in multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), as the policy learned by confederate MARL depends on the collaborative approach among multiple agents. Another important problem is the less…
We investigate the problem of best-policy identification in discounted Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) when the learner has access to a generative model. The objective is to devise a learning algorithm returning the best policy as early as…
Reinforcement learning with sparse rewards is still an open challenge. Classic methods rely on getting feedback via extrinsic rewards to train the agent, and in situations where this occurs very rarely the agent learns slowly or cannot…
Offline reinforcement learning (RL) aims to optimize a policy using collected data without online interactions. Model-based approaches are particularly appealing for addressing offline RL challenges because of their capability to mitigate…
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…
Sparse-reward reinforcement learning (RL) remains fundamentally hard: without structure, any agent needs $\Omega(|\mathcal{S}||\mathcal{A}|/p)$ samples to recover rewards. We introduce Policy-Aware Matrix Completion (PAMC) as a first…