Related papers: Policy Mirror Descent with Temporal Difference Lea…
Learning the value function of a given policy (target policy) from the data samples obtained from a different policy (behavior policy) is an important problem in Reinforcement Learning (RL). This problem is studied under the setting of…
The Robust Markov Decision Process (RMDP) framework focuses on designing control policies that are robust against the parameter uncertainties due to the mismatches between the simulator model and real-world settings. An RMDP problem is…
This paper revisits the temporal difference (TD) learning algorithm for the policy evaluation tasks in reinforcement learning. Typically, the performance of TD(0) and TD($\lambda$) is very sensitive to the choice of stepsizes. Oftentimes,…
Balancing between computational efficiency and sample efficiency is an important goal in reinforcement learning. Temporal difference (TD) learning algorithms stochastically update the value function, with a linear time complexity in the…
In this paper we extend temporal difference policy evaluation algorithms to performance criteria that include the variance of the cumulative reward. Such criteria are useful for risk management, and are important in domains such as finance…
We address the problem of policy evaluation in discounted Markov decision processes, and provide instance-dependent guarantees on the $\ell_\infty$-error under a generative model. We establish both asymptotic and non-asymptotic versions of…
Constrained Markov Decision Process (CMDP) is a natural framework for reinforcement learning tasks with safety constraints, where agents learn a policy that maximizes the long-term reward while satisfying the constraints on the long-term…
Online off-policy reinforcement learning (RL) is shaped by two coupled choices: the policy class and the update rule. Gaussian policies are fast and have tractable entropy, but struggle with multimodal action distributions. Generative…
We study an approximation method for partially observed Markov decision processes (POMDPs) with continuous spaces. Belief MDP reduction, which has been the standard approach to study POMDPs requires rigorous approximation methods for…
Multi-objective optimization models that encode ordered sequential constraints provide a solution to model various challenging problems including encoding preferences, modeling a curriculum, and enforcing measures of safety. A recently…
This paper investigates the optimization problem of an infinite stage discrete time Markov decision process (MDP) with a long-run average metric considering both mean and variance of rewards together. Such performance metric is important…
We consider the problem of distributed online optimization, with a group of learners connected via a dynamic communication graph. The goal of the learners is to track the global minimizer of a sum of time-varying loss functions in a…
We consider a constrained Markov Decision Problem (CMDP) where the goal of an agent is to maximize the expected discounted sum of rewards over an infinite horizon while ensuring that the expected discounted sum of costs exceeds a certain…
We study the policy evaluation problem in multi-agent reinforcement learning, modeled by a Markov decision process. In this problem, the agents operate in a common environment under a fixed control policy, working together to discover the…
This paper analyzes multi-step temporal difference (TD)-learning algorithms within the ``deadly triad'' scenario, characterized by linear function approximation, off-policy learning, and bootstrapping. In particular, we prove that $n$-step…
Online mirror descent (OMD) and dual averaging (DA) -- two fundamental algorithms for online convex optimization -- are known to have very similar (and sometimes identical) performance guarantees when used with a fixed learning rate. Under…
The proximal policy optimization (PPO) algorithm stands as one of the most prosperous methods in the field of reinforcement learning (RL). Despite its success, the theoretical understanding of PPO remains deficient. Specifically, it is…
This paper addresses the problem of approximating an unknown probability distribution with density $f$ -- which can only be evaluated up to an unknown scaling factor -- with the help of a sequential algorithm that produces at each iteration…
We consider the problem of learning a policy for a Markov decision process consistent with data captured on the state-actions pairs followed by the policy. We assume that the policy belongs to a class of parameterized policies which are…
We study the unconstrained and the minimax saddle point variants of the convex multi-stage stochastic programming problem, where consecutive decisions are coupled through the objective functions, rather than through the constraints. We…