Related papers: A Mutual Information-based Metric for Temporal Exp…
Potential-based reward shaping is commonly used to incorporate prior knowledge of how to solve the task into reinforcement learning because it can formally guarantee policy invariance. As such, the optimal policy and the ordering of…
We integrate information-theoretic concepts into the design and analysis of optimistic algorithms and Thompson sampling. By making a connection between information-theoretic quantities and confidence bounds, we obtain results that relate…
Offline Reinforcement learning is commonly used for sequential decision-making in domains such as healthcare and education, where the rewards are known and the transition dynamics $T$ must be estimated on the basis of batch data. A key…
Representation learning methods utilizing the InfoNCE loss have demonstrated considerable capacity in reducing human annotation effort by training invariant neural feature extractors. Although different variants of the training objective…
Robust real-world learning should benefit from both demonstrations and interactions with the environment. Current approaches to learning from demonstration and reward perform supervised learning on expert demonstration data and use…
The Exploration-Exploitation tradeoff arises in Reinforcement Learning when one cannot tell if a policy is optimal. Then, there is a constant need to explore new actions instead of exploiting past experience. In practice, it is common to…
We study the problem of efficiently estimating policies that simultaneously optimize multiple objectives in reinforcement learning (RL). Given $n$ objectives (or tasks), we seek the optimal partition of these objectives into $k \ll n$…
A Markov decision process can be parameterized by a transition kernel and a reward function. Both play essential roles in the study of reinforcement learning as evidenced by their presence in the Bellman equations. In our inquiry of various…
We introduce the framework of performative reinforcement learning where the policy chosen by the learner affects the underlying reward and transition dynamics of the environment. Following the recent literature on performative…
Reinforcement learning algorithms struggle when the reward signal is very sparse. In these cases, naive random exploration methods essentially rely on a random walk to stumble onto a rewarding state. Recent works utilize intrinsic…
In the context of average-reward reinforcement learning, the requirement for oracle knowledge of the mixing time, a measure of the duration a Markov chain under a fixed policy needs to achieve its stationary distribution, poses a…
Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) for Large Reasoning Models hinges on baseline estimation for variance reduction, but existing approaches pay a heavy price: PPO requires a policy-model scale critic, while GRPO needs…
Standard reinforcement learning (RL) optimizes policies for reward but imposes few constraints on how decisions evolve over time. As a result, policies may achieve high performance while exhibiting temporally incoherent behavior such as…
Reinforcement learning can learn amortised design policies for designing sequences of experiments. However, current amortised methods rely on estimators of expected information gain (EIG) that require an exponential number of samples on the…
We propose a method for learning expressive energy-based policies for continuous states and actions, which has been feasible only in tabular domains before. We apply our method to learning maximum entropy policies, resulting into a new…
This paper proposes a safe reinforcement learning algorithm for generation bidding decisions and unit maintenance scheduling in a competitive electricity market environment. In this problem, each unit aims to find a bidding strategy that…
Reinforcement learning (RL) is about sequential decision making and is traditionally opposed to supervised learning (SL) and unsupervised learning (USL). In RL, given the current state, the agent makes a decision that may influence the next…
In order to model risk aversion in reinforcement learning, an emerging line of research adapts familiar algorithms to optimize coherent risk functionals, a class that includes conditional value-at-risk (CVaR). Because optimizing the…
We introduce a framework for Bayesian experimental design (BED) with implicit models, where the data-generating distribution is intractable but sampling from it is still possible. In order to find optimal experimental designs for such…
Understanding the agent's learning process, particularly the factors that contribute to its success or failure post-training, is crucial for comprehending the rationale behind the agent's decision-making process. Prior methods clarify the…