Related papers: Planning and Learning in Average Risk-aware MDPs
In this paper, we consider Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) with error states. Error states are those states entering which is undesirable or dangerous. We define the risk with respect to a policy as the probability of entering such a state…
Training Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents in high-stakes applications might be too prohibitive due to the risk associated to exploration. Thus, the agent can only use data previously collected by safe policies. While previous work…
Designing tax policies that are effective in curbing tax evasion and maximize state revenues requires a rigorous understanding of taxpayer behavior. This work explores the problem of determining the strategy a self-interested, risk-averse…
Reinforcement learning (RL) has seen significant research and application results but often requires large amounts of training data. This paper proposes two data-efficient off-policy RL methods that use parametrized Q-learning. In these…
Reinforcement learning (RL) for exponential-utility optimization in discounted Markov decision processes (MDPs) lacks principled value-based algorithms. We address this gap in the fixed risk-aversion setting. Building on the Bellman-type…
We present a non-asymptotic convergence analysis of $Q$-learning and actor-critic algorithms for robust average-reward Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) under contamination, total-variation (TV) distance, and Wasserstein uncertainty sets. A…
We show two average-reward off-policy control algorithms, Differential Q-learning (Wan, Naik, & Sutton 2021a) and RVI Q-learning (Abounadi Bertsekas & Borkar 2001), converge in weakly communicating MDPs. Weakly communicating MDPs are the…
We propose policy gradient algorithms which learn risk-sensitive policies in a reinforcement learning (RL) framework. Our proposed algorithms maximize the distortion risk measure (DRM) of the cumulative reward in an episodic Markov decision…
Model-free reinforcement learning algorithms combined with value function approximation have recently achieved impressive performance in a variety of application domains. However, the theoretical understanding of such algorithms is limited,…
Robust reinforcement learning (RRL) aims at seeking a robust policy to optimize the worst case performance over an uncertainty set of Markov decision processes (MDPs). This set contains some perturbed MDPs from a nominal MDP (N-MDP) that…
Model-based reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms allow us to combine model-generated data with those collected from interaction with the real system in order to alleviate the data efficiency problem in RL. However, designing such…
We study the problem of estimating the optimal Q-function of $\gamma$-discounted Markov decision processes (MDPs) under the synchronous setting, where independent samples for all state-action pairs are drawn from a generative model at each…
We consider the problem of designing policies for partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) with dynamic coherent risk objectives. Synthesizing risk-averse optimal policies for POMDPs requires infinite memory and thus…
This paper applies the authors' recent results on asynchronous stochastic approximation (SA) in the Borkar-Meyn framework to reinforcement learning in average-reward semi-Markov decision processes (SMDPs). We establish the convergence of an…
In this paper we address the problem of decision making within a Markov decision process (MDP) framework where risk and modeling errors are taken into account. Our approach is to minimize a risk-sensitive conditional-value-at-risk (CVaR)…
This paper presents a model-free reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm to solve the risk-averse optimal control (RAOC) problem for discrete-time nonlinear systems. While successful RL algorithms have been presented to learn optimal control…
We introduce a model-free algorithm for learning in Markov decision processes with parameterized actions-discrete actions with continuous parameters. At each step the agent must select both which action to use and which parameters to use…
Robust reinforcement learning (RL) under the average-reward criterion is essential for long-term decision-making, particularly when the environment may differ from its specification. However, a significant gap exists in understanding the…
Average-reward reinforcement learning offers a principled framework for long-term decision-making by maximizing the mean reward per time step. Although Q-learning is a widely used model-free algorithm with established sample complexity in…
In this paper, we consider the problem of optimization and learning for constrained and multi-objective Markov decision processes, for both discounted rewards and expected average rewards. We formulate the problems as zero-sum games where…