Related papers: Q-Learning with Shift-Aware Upper Confidence Bound…
We consider a reinforcement learning setting in which the deployment environment is different from the training environment. Applying a robust Markov decision processes formulation, we extend the distributionally robust $Q$-learning…
Reinforcement learning (RL) provides a principled framework for decision-making in partially observable environments, which can be modeled as Markov decision processes and compactly represented through dynamic decision Bayesian networks.…
Some reinforcement learning methods suffer from high sample complexity causing them to not be practical in real-world situations. $Q$-function reuse, a transfer learning method, is one way to reduce the sample complexity of learning,…
We consider online learning for episodic stochastically constrained Markov decision processes (CMDPs), which plays a central role in ensuring the safety of reinforcement learning. Here the loss function can vary arbitrarily across the…
A wide range of sustainability and grid-integration strategies depend on workload shifting, which aligns the timing of energy consumption with external signals such as grid curtailment events, carbon intensity, or time-of-use electricity…
Animal health monitoring and population management are critical aspects of wildlife conservation and livestock management that increasingly rely on automated detection and tracking systems. While Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) based systems…
This paper concerns the central issues of model robustness and sample efficiency in offline reinforcement learning (RL), which aims to learn to perform decision making from history data without active exploration. Due to uncertainties and…
We consider what we call the offline-to-online learning setting, focusing on stochastic finite-armed bandit problems. In offline-to-online learning, a learner starts with offline data collected from interactions with an unknown environment…
Interacting with the actual environment to acquire data is often costly and time-consuming in robotic tasks. Model-based offline reinforcement learning (RL) provides a feasible solution. On the one hand, it eliminates the requirements of…
$Q$-learning with function approximation is one of the most popular methods in reinforcement learning. Though the idea of using function approximation was proposed at least 60 years ago, even in the simplest setup, i.e, approximating…
We study a finite-horizon restless multi-armed bandit problem with multiple actions, dubbed R(MA)^2B. The state of each arm evolves according to a controlled Markov decision process (MDP), and the reward of pulling an arm depends on both…
Reinforcement learning (RL) has demonstrated potential in autonomous driving (AD) decision tasks. However, applying RL to urban AD, particularly in intersection scenarios, still faces significant challenges. The lack of safety constraints…
Quality-Diversity (QD) algorithms excel at discovering diverse repertoires of skills, but are hindered by poor sample efficiency and often require tens of millions of environment steps to solve complex locomotion tasks. Recent advances in…
We study the regret guarantee for risk-sensitive reinforcement learning (RSRL) via distributional reinforcement learning (DRL) methods. In particular, we consider finite episodic Markov decision processes whose objective is the entropic…
We consider reinforcement learning (RL) in episodic Markov decision processes (MDPs) with linear function approximation under drifting environment. Specifically, both the reward and state transition functions can evolve over time but their…
Many physical systems have underlying safety considerations that require that the strategy deployed ensures the satisfaction of a set of constraints. Further, often we have only partial information on the state of the system. We study the…
We study the fundamental problem of transfer learning where a learning algorithm collects data from some source distribution $P$ but needs to perform well with respect to a different target distribution $Q$. A standard change of measure…
Offline (or batch) reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms seek to learn an optimal policy from a fixed dataset without active data collection. Based on the composition of the offline dataset, two main categories of methods are used:…
We consider the exploration-exploitation dilemma in finite-horizon reinforcement learning problems whose state-action space is endowed with a metric. We introduce Kernel-UCBVI, a model-based optimistic algorithm that leverages the…
In many real-world sequential decision-making problems, an action does not immediately reflect on the feedback and spreads its effects over a long time frame. For instance, in online advertising, investing in a platform produces an…