Related papers: Planning and Learning in Average Risk-aware MDPs
We study the problem of learning policies that maximize cumulative reward while satisfying safety constraints, even when the real environment differs from a simulator or nominal model. We focus on robust constrained Markov decision…
For infinite-horizon average-cost criterion problems, there exist relatively few rigorous approximation and reinforcement learning results. In this paper, for Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) with standard Borel spaces, (i) we first provide…
Keeping risk under control is often more crucial than maximizing expected rewards in real-world decision-making situations, such as finance, robotics, autonomous driving, etc. The most natural choice of risk measures is variance, which…
We present a novel theoretical framework, Q-MMR, for off-policy evaluation in finite-horizon MDPs. Q-MMR learns a set of scalar weights, one for each data point, such that the reweighted rewards approximate the expected return under the…
Recursion is the fundamental paradigm to finitely describe potentially infinite objects. As state-of-the-art reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms cannot directly reason about recursion, they must rely on the practitioner's ingenuity in…
We introduce a novel approach to hierarchical reinforcement learning for Linearly-solvable Markov Decision Processes (LMDPs) in the infinite-horizon average-reward setting. Unlike previous work, our approach allows learning low-level and…
Informed and robust decision making in the face of uncertainty is critical for robots that perform physical tasks alongside people. We formulate this as Bayesian Reinforcement Learning over latent Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). While…
We study risk-sensitive reinforcement learning in finite discounted MDPs with recursive entropic risk measures (ERM), where the risk parameter $\beta \neq 0$ controls the agent's risk attitude: $\beta>0$ for risk-averse and $\beta<0$ for…
In many sequential decision-making problems we may want to manage risk by minimizing some measure of variability in rewards in addition to maximizing a standard criterion. Variance related risk measures are among the most common…
Markov decision processes (MDPs) are used to model stochastic systems in many applications. Several efficient algorithms to compute optimal policies have been studied in the literature, including value iteration (VI) and policy iteration.…
Modified policy iteration (MPI) is a dynamic programming algorithm that combines elements of policy iteration and value iteration. The convergence of MPI has been well studied in the context of discounted and average-cost MDPs. In this…
In applications of offline reinforcement learning to observational data, such as in healthcare or education, a general concern is that observed actions might be affected by unobserved factors, inducing confounding and biasing estimates…
RL with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has emerged as a promising paradigm for improving the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs). Current methods rely primarily on policy optimization frameworks like PPO and GRPO, which follow…
We propose a new reinforcement learning algorithm derived from a regularized linear-programming formulation of optimal control in MDPs. The method is closely related to the classic Relative Entropy Policy Search (REPS) algorithm of Peters…
We consider reinforcement learning (RL) in Markov Decision Processes in which an agent repeatedly interacts with an environment that is modeled by a controlled Markov process. At each time step $t$, it earns a reward, and also incurs a…
We develop a framework for convexifying a fairly general class of optimization problems. Under additional assumptions, we analyze the suboptimality of the solution to the convexified problem relative to the original nonconvex problem and…
We investigate and analyze principles of typical motion planning algorithms. These include traditional planning algorithms, supervised learning, optimal value reinforcement learning, policy gradient reinforcement learning. Traditional…
Reinforcement learning has achieved great success in many decision-making tasks, and traditional reinforcement learning algorithms are mainly designed for obtaining a single optimal solution. However, recent works show the importance of…
Markov decision processes (MDPs) is viewed as an optimization of an objective function over certain linear operators over general function spaces. A new existence result is established for the existence of optimal policies in general MDPs,…
In this work, we design quantum algorithms that are more efficient than classical algorithms to solve time-dependent and finite-horizon Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) in two distinct settings: (1) In the exact dynamics setting, where the…