Related papers: On the Effect of Regularization in Policy Mirror D…
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,…
We consider the problem of simultaneously learning to linearly combine a very large number of kernels and learn a good predictor based on the learnt kernel. When the number of kernels $d$ to be combined is very large, multiple kernel…
Instability and slowness are two main problems in deep reinforcement learning. Even if proximal policy optimization (PPO) is the state of the art, it still suffers from these two problems. We introduce an improved algorithm based on…
Hybrid Reinforcement Learning (RL), where an agent learns from both an offline dataset and online explorations in an unknown environment, has garnered significant recent interest. A crucial question posed by Xie et al. (2022) is whether…
We study a primal-dual (PD) reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm for online constrained Markov decision processes (CMDPs). Despite its widespread practical use, the existing theoretical literature on PD-RL algorithms for this problem only…
Projected policy gradient under the simplex parameterization, policy gradient and natural policy gradient under the softmax parameterization, are fundamental algorithms in reinforcement learning. There have been a flurry of recent…
We study the setting of \emph{performative reinforcement learning} where the deployed policy affects both the reward, and the transition of the underlying Markov decision process. Prior work~\parencite{MTR23} has addressed this problem…
Model-based offline reinforcement learning (RL) aims to find highly rewarding policy, by leveraging a previously collected static dataset and a dynamics model. While the dynamics model learned through reuse of the static dataset, its…
Model predictive control (MPC) is a powerful technique for solving dynamic control tasks. In this paper, we show that there exists a close connection between MPC and online learning, an abstract theoretical framework for analyzing online…
Recent work by Woodworth et al. (2020) shows that the optimization dynamics of gradient descent for overparameterized problems can be viewed as low-dimensional dual dynamics induced by a mirror map, explaining the implicit regularization…
Recent advancements in off-policy Reinforcement Learning (RL) have significantly improved sample efficiency, primarily due to the incorporation of various forms of regularization that enable more gradient update steps than traditional…
We describe an application of Wasserstein distance to Reinforcement Learning. The Wasserstein distance in question is between the distribution of mappings of trajectories of a policy into some metric space, and some other fixed distribution…
This paper targets the efficient construction of a safety shield for decision making in scenarios that incorporate uncertainty. Markov decision processes (MDPs) are prominent models to capture such planning problems. Reinforcement learning…
When Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents are deployed in practice, they might impact their environment and change its dynamics. We propose a new framework to model this phenomenon, where the current environment depends on the deployed policy…
Guided policy search algorithms can be used to optimize complex nonlinear policies, such as deep neural networks, without directly computing policy gradients in the high-dimensional parameter space. Instead, these methods use supervised…
Entropic regularization of policies in Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a commonly used heuristic to ensure that the learned policy explores the state-space sufficiently before overfitting to a local optimal policy. The primary motivation for…
Entropy regularization has been widely used in policy optimization algorithms to enhance exploration and the robustness of the optimal control; however it also introduces an additional regularization bias. This work quantifies the impact of…
Policy gradient methods equipped with deep neural networks have achieved great success in solving high-dimensional reinforcement learning (RL) problems. However, current analyses cannot explain why they are resistant to the curse of…
Reinforcement learning (RL) has achieved remarkable success in a wide range of control and decision-making tasks. However, RL agents often exhibit unstable or degraded performance when deployed in environments subject to unexpected external…
Low-complexity non-smooth convex regularizers are routinely used to impose some structure (such as sparsity or low-rank) on the coefficients for linear predictors in supervised learning. Model consistency consists then in selecting the…