Related papers: From Generative to Episodic: Sample-Efficient Repl…
Bayesian Reinforcement Learning (RL) is capable of not only incorporating domain knowledge, but also solving the exploration-exploitation dilemma in a natural way. As Bayesian RL is intractable except for special cases, previous work has…
Offline reinforcement learning seeks to utilize offline (observational) data to guide the learning of (causal) sequential decision making strategies. The hope is that offline reinforcement learning coupled with function approximation…
Learning to plan for long horizons is a central challenge in episodic reinforcement learning problems. A fundamental question is to understand how the difficulty of the problem scales as the horizon increases. Here the natural measure of…
Reasoning abilities, especially those for solving complex math problems, are crucial components of general intelligence. Recent advances by proprietary companies, such as o-series models of OpenAI, have made remarkable progress on reasoning…
Episodic training, where an agent's environment is reset after every success or failure, is the de facto standard when training embodied reinforcement learning (RL) agents. The underlying assumption that the environment can be easily reset…
Reinforcement learning (RL) is a dominant paradigm for improving the reasoning abilities of large language models, yet its effectiveness varies across tasks and compute budgets. We propose a \emph{relative-budget} theory explaining this…
While reinforcement learning (RL) methods that learn an internal model of the environment have the potential to be more sample efficient than their model-free counterparts, learning to model raw observations from high dimensional sensors…
Multi-task representation learning (MTRL) is an approach that learns shared latent representations across related tasks, facilitating collaborative learning that improves the overall learning efficiency. This paper studies MTRL for…
We study the problem of reinforcement learning (RL) with low (policy) switching cost - a problem well-motivated by real-life RL applications in which deployments of new policies are costly and the number of policy updates must be low. In…
Recent research has employed reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms to optimize long-term user engagement in recommender systems, thereby avoiding common pitfalls such as user boredom and filter bubbles. They capture the sequential and…
We consider a Reinforcement Learning setup where an agent interacts with an environment in observation-reward-action cycles without any (esp.\ MDP) assumptions on the environment. State aggregation and more generally feature reinforcement…
This work considers the sample and computational complexity of obtaining an $\epsilon$-optimal policy in a discounted Markov Decision Process (MDP), given only access to a generative model. In this work, we study the effectiveness of the…
While policy-based reinforcement learning (RL) achieves tremendous successes in practice, it is significantly less understood in theory, especially compared with value-based RL. In particular, it remains elusive how to design a provably…
This dissertation investigates how reinforcement learning (RL) methods can be designed to be safe, sample-efficient, and robust. Framed through the unifying perspective of contextual-bandit RL, the work addresses two major application…
We consider the reinforcement learning (RL) problem with general utilities which consists in maximizing a function of the state-action occupancy measure. Beyond the standard cumulative reward RL setting, this problem includes as particular…
Replicability requires that algorithmic conclusions remain consistent when rerun on independently drawn data. A central structural question is composition: given $k$ problems each admitting a $\rho$-replicable algorithm with sample…
In many practical applications of RL, it is expensive to observe state transitions from the environment. For example, in the problem of plasma control for nuclear fusion, computing the next state for a given state-action pair requires…
Reinforcement learning (RL) in the real world necessitates the development of procedures that enable agents to explore without causing harm to themselves or others. The most successful solutions to the problem of safe RL leverage offline…
Due to the high efficiency and less weather dependency, autonomous greenhouses provide an ideal solution to meet the increasing demand for fresh food. However, managers are faced with some challenges in finding appropriate control…
Despite significant progress in challenging problems across various domains, applying state-of-the-art deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms remains challenging due to their sensitivity to the choice of hyperparameters. This…