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We propose a new simple and natural algorithm for learning the optimal Q-value function of a discounted-cost Markov Decision Process (MDP) when the transition kernels are unknown. Unlike the classical learning algorithms for MDPs, such as…
We study the reinforcement learning problem for discounted Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) under the tabular setting. We propose a model-based algorithm named UCBVI-$\gamma$, which is based on the \emph{optimism in the face of uncertainty…
Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs) are fundamental to many real-world applications. Although reinforcement learning (RL) has shown success in fully observable domains, learning policies from traces in partially…
Recently, there has been rising interest in Bayesian optimization -- the optimization of an unknown function with assumptions usually expressed by a Gaussian Process (GP) prior. We study an optimization strategy that directly uses an…
In most real-world reinforcement learning applications, state information is only partially observable, which breaks the Markov decision process assumption and leads to inferior performance for algorithms that conflate observations with…
Variable selection in Gaussian processes (GPs) is typically undertaken by thresholding the inverse lengthscales of automatic relevance determination kernels, but in high-dimensional datasets this approach can be unreliable. A more…
Optimizing a partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP) policy is challenging. The policy graph improvement (PGI) algorithm for POMDPs represents the policy as a fixed size policy graph and improves the policy monotonically. Due…
In real-world scenarios, the observation data for reinforcement learning with continuous control is commonly noisy and part of it may be dynamically missing over time, which violates the assumption of many current methods developed for…
We consider finite model approximations of discrete-time partially observed Markov decision processes (POMDPs) under the discounted cost criterion. After converting the original partially observed stochastic control problem to a fully…
We consider partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) with a set of target states and every transition is associated with an integer cost. The optimization objective we study asks to minimize the expected total cost till the…
Partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) are a fundamental model for sequential decision-making under uncertainty. However, many verification and synthesis problems for POMDPs are undecidable or intractable. Most prominently,…
Partially-Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs) are a well-known stochastic model for sequential decision making under limited information. We consider the EXPTIME-hard problem of synthesising policies that almost-surely reach some…
In many scientific and engineering applications, we are tasked with the maximisation of an expensive to evaluate black box function $f$. Traditional settings for this problem assume just the availability of this single function. However, in…
Gaussian process (GP) based Bayesian optimization (BO) is a powerful method for optimizing black-box functions efficiently. The practical performance and theoretical guarantees of this approach depend on having the correct GP hyperparameter…
We consider finite-horizon Markov Decision Processes where parameters, such as transition probabilities, are unknown and estimated from data. The popular distributionally robust approach to addressing the parameter uncertainty can sometimes…
We consider online learning for episodic stochastically constrained Markov decision processes (CMDPs), which plays a central role in ensuring the safety of reinforcement learning. Here the loss function can vary arbitrarily across the…
Projection methods aim to reduce the dimensionality of the optimization instance, thereby improving the scalability of high-dimensional problems. Recently, Sakaue and Oki proposed a data-driven approach for linear programs (LPs), where the…
I study the estimation of semiparametric monotone index models in the scenario where the number of observation points $n$ is extremely large and conventional approaches fail to work due to heavy computational burdens. Motivated by the…
Among various acquisition functions (AFs) in Bayesian optimization (BO), Gaussian process upper confidence bound (GP-UCB) and Thompson sampling (TS) are well-known options with established theoretical properties regarding Bayesian…
Robust Markov decision processes (RMDPs) extend standard Markov decision processes (MDPs) to account for uncertainty in the transition probabilities. RMDPs have an uncertainty set that defines a set of possible transition functions, each of…