Related papers: On the Effect of Regularization in Policy Mirror D…
Distributionally Robust Optimization (DRO) has enabled to prove the equivalence between robustness and regularization in classification and regression, thus providing an analytical reason why regularization generalizes well in statistical…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) has demonstrated a huge potential in learning optimal policies without any prior knowledge of the process to be controlled. Model Predictive Control (MPC) is a popular control technique which is able to deal with…
Learning-to-optimize (L2O) is an emerging research area in large-scale optimization with applications in data science. Recently, researchers have proposed a novel L2O framework called learned mirror descent (LMD), based on the classical…
Tremendous progress has been made in reinforcement learning (RL) over the past decade. Most of these advancements came through the continual development of new algorithms, which were designed using a combination of mathematical derivations,…
Reinforcement learning algorithms for mean-field games offer a scalable framework for optimizing policies in large populations of interacting agents. Existing methods often depend on online interactions or access to system dynamics,…
We propose a general framework for entropy-regularized average-reward reinforcement learning in Markov decision processes (MDPs). Our approach is based on extending the linear-programming formulation of policy optimization in MDPs to…
Policy gradient methods, which have been extensively studied in the last decade, offer an effective and efficient framework for reinforcement learning problems. However, their performances can often be unsatisfactory, suffering from…
Specifying a Reinforcement Learning (RL) task involves choosing a suitable planning horizon, which is typically modeled by a discount factor. It is known that applying RL algorithms with a lower discount factor can act as a regularizer,…
Mirror descent (MD) is a powerful first-order optimization technique that subsumes several optimization algorithms including gradient descent (GD). In this work, we develop a semi-definite programming (SDP) framework to analyze the…
Optimisers are an essential component for training machine learning models, and their design influences learning speed and generalisation. Several studies have attempted to learn more effective gradient-descent optimisers via solving a…
Online safe reinforcement learning (RL) plays a key role in dynamic environments, with applications in autonomous driving, robotics, and cybersecurity. The objective is to learn optimal policies that maximize rewards while satisfying safety…
Value iteration-type methods have been extensively studied for computing a nearly optimal value function in reinforcement learning (RL). Under a generative sampling model, these methods can achieve sharper sample complexity than policy…
We study reinforcement learning by combining recent advances in regularized linear programming formulations with the classical theory of stochastic approximation. Motivated by the challenge of designing algorithms that leverage off-policy…
Dealing with high variance is a significant challenge in model-free reinforcement learning (RL). Existing methods are unreliable, exhibiting high variance in performance from run to run using different initializations/seeds. Focusing on…
Recently, adversarial imitation learning has shown a scalable reward acquisition method for inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) problems. However, estimated reward signals often become uncertain and fail to train a reliable statistical…
Discount regularization, using a shorter planning horizon when calculating the optimal policy, is a popular choice to restrict planning to a less complex set of policies when estimating an MDP from sparse or noisy data (Jiang et al., 2015).…
Uncertainties in transition dynamics pose a critical challenge in reinforcement learning (RL), often resulting in performance degradation of trained policies when deployed on hardware. Many robust RL approaches follow two strategies:…
The Robust Regularized Markov Decision Process (RRMDP) is proposed to learn policies robust to dynamics shifts by adding regularization to the transition dynamics in the value function. Existing methods mostly use unstructured…
Reinforcement learning (RL) is currently one of the most prominent methods for optimizing dynamical systems, with breakthrough results across various fields. The framework is based on the concept of a Markov decision process (MDP), leading…
Recent works in Reinforcement Learning (RL) combine model-free (Mf)-RL algorithms with model-based (Mb)-RL approaches to get the best from both: asymptotic performance of Mf-RL and high sample-efficiency of Mb-RL. Inspired by these works,…