Related papers: Beyond expected value: geometric mean optimization…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) remains a central optimisation framework in machine learning. Although RL agents can converge to optimal solutions, the definition of ``optimality'' depends on the environment's statistical properties. The…
Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms typically deal with maximizing the expected cumulative return (discounted or undiscounted, finite or infinite horizon). However, several crucial applications in the real world, such as drug discovery,…
Envisioned application areas for reinforcement learning (RL) include autonomous driving, precision agriculture, and finance, which all require RL agents to make decisions in the real world. A significant challenge hindering the adoption of…
Self-paced reinforcement learning (RL) aims to improve the data efficiency of learning by automatically creating sequences, namely curricula, of probability distributions over contexts. However, existing techniques for self-paced RL fail in…
Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms assume that users specify tasks by manually writing down a reward function. However, this process can be laborious and demands considerable technical expertise. Can we devise RL algorithms that instead…
With the impact of real-time processing being realized in the recent past, the need for efficient implementations of reinforcement learning algorithms has been on the rise. Albeit the numerous advantages of Bellman equations utilized in RL…
Finding optimal policies which maximize long term rewards of Markov Decision Processes requires the use of dynamic programming and backward induction to solve the Bellman optimality equation. However, many real-world problems require…
The endeavor of artificial intelligence (AI) is to design autonomous agents capable of achieving complex tasks. Namely, reinforcement learning (RL) proposes a theoretical background to learn optimal behaviors. In practice, RL algorithms…
Many AI problems, in robotics and other domains, are goal-based, essentially seeking trajectories leading to various goal states. Reinforcement learning (RL), building on Bellman's optimality equation, naturally optimizes for a single goal,…
In reinforcement learning, we typically aim to optimize the expected value of the sum of rewards an agent collects over a trajectory. However, if the process generating these rewards is non-ergodic, the expected value, i.e., the average…
The interaction between an artificial agent and its environment is bi-directional. The agent extracts relevant information from the environment, and affects the environment by its actions in return to accumulate high expected reward.…
In reinforcement learning (RL), aligning agent behavior with specific objectives typically requires careful design of the reward function, which can be challenging when the desired objectives are complex. In this work, we propose an…
Meta-reinforcement learning (Meta-RL) has attracted attention due to its capability to enhance reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms, in terms of data efficiency and generalizability. In this paper, we develop a bilevel optimization…
We propose a novel algorithmic framework for distributional reinforcement learning, based on learning finite-dimensional mean embeddings of return distributions. We derive several new algorithms for dynamic programming and…
There has been significant progress in deep reinforcement learning (RL) in recent years. Nevertheless, finding suitable hyperparameter configurations and reward functions remains challenging even for experts, and performance heavily relies…
In reinforcement learning, two objective functions have been developed extensively in the literature: discounted and averaged rewards. The generalization to an entropy-regularized setting has led to improved robustness and exploration for…
Reinforcement learning (RL) methods often rely on massive exploration data to search optimal policies, and suffer from poor sampling efficiency. This paper presents a mixed reinforcement learning (mixed RL) algorithm by simultaneously using…
We study estimation and inference using data collected by reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms. These algorithms adaptively experiment by interacting with individual units over multiple stages, updating their strategies based on past…
Option-critic learning is a general-purpose reinforcement learning (RL) framework that aims to address the issue of long term credit assignment by leveraging temporal abstractions. However, when dealing with extended timescales, discounting…
In many real-world settings, reinforcement learning systems suffer performance degradation when the environment encountered at deployment differs from that observed during training. Distributionally robust reinforcement learning (DR-RL)…