Related papers: Representative Action Selection for Large Action S…
We study the problem of selecting a subset from a large action space shared by a family of bandits. In many natural situations, while the nominal set of actions is large, actions are highly correlated: many yield similar rewards across…
Reinforcement learning (RL) agents are commonly trained and evaluated in the same environment. In contrast, humans often train in a specialized environment before being evaluated, such as studying a book before taking an exam. The potential…
In the reinforcement learning literature, there are many algorithms developed for either Contextual Bandit (CB) or Markov Decision Processes (MDP) environments. However, when deploying reinforcement learning algorithms in the real world,…
We study a system with finitely many groups of multi-action bandit processes, each of which is a Markov decision process (MDP) with finite state and action spaces and potentially different transition matrices when taking different actions.…
Reinforcement learning often needs to deal with the exponential growth of states and actions when exploring optimal control in high-dimensional spaces (often known as the curse of dimensionality). In this work, we address this issue by…
An in-depth understanding of the particular environment is crucial in reinforcement learning (RL). To address this challenge, the decision-making process of a mobile collaborative robotic assistant modeled by the Markov decision process…
We consider model selection for classic Reinforcement Learning (RL) environments -- Multi Armed Bandits (MABs) and Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) -- under general function approximations. In the model selection framework, we do not know…
In supervised learning, we fit a single statistical model to a given data set, assuming that the data is associated with a singular task, which yields well-tuned models for specific use, but does not adapt well to new contexts. By contrast,…
In order to make good decision under uncertainty an agent must learn from observations. To do so, two of the most common frameworks are Contextual Bandits and Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). In this paper, we study whether there exist…
Markov decision processes (MDPs) are a well studied framework for solving sequential decision making problems under uncertainty. Exact methods for solving MDPs based on dynamic programming such as policy iteration and value iteration are…
Policy-based algorithms are among the most widely adopted techniques in model-free RL, thanks to their strong theoretical groundings and good properties in continuous action spaces. Unfortunately, these methods require precise and…
We consider the Markov Decision Process (MDP) of selecting a subset of items at each step, termed the Select-MDP (S-MDP). The large state and action spaces of S-MDPs make them intractable to solve with typical reinforcement learning (RL)…
The Markov decision process (MDP) formulation used to model many real-world sequential decision making problems does not efficiently capture the setting where the set of available decisions (actions) at each time step is stochastic.…
A common setting of reinforcement learning (RL) is a Markov decision process (MDP) in which the environment is a stochastic discrete-time dynamical system. Whereas MDPs are suitable in such applications as video-games or puzzles, physical…
In this paper, we study representation learning for multi-task decision-making in non-stationary environments. We consider the framework of sequential linear bandits, where the agent performs a series of tasks drawn from distinct sets…
The curse of dimensionality is a widely known issue in reinforcement learning (RL). In the tabular setting where the state space $\mathcal{S}$ and the action space $\mathcal{A}$ are both finite, to obtain a nearly optimal policy with…
Many real-world problems come with action spaces represented as feature vectors. Although high-dimensional control is a largely unsolved problem, there has recently been progress for modest dimensionalities. Here we report on a successful…
A central problem in sequential decision making is to develop algorithms that are practical and computationally efficient, yet support the use of flexible, general-purpose models. Focusing on the contextual bandit problem, recent progress…
One of the key approaches to save samples in reinforcement learning (RL) is to use knowledge from an approximate model such as its simulator. However, how much does an approximate model help to learn a near-optimal policy of the true…
Planning plays an important role in the broad class of decision theory. Planning has drawn much attention in recent work in the robotics and sequential decision making areas. Recently, Reinforcement Learning (RL), as an agent-environment…