Related papers: Robust Bayesian Dynamic Programming for On-policy …
Many sequential decision-making problems that are currently automated, such as those in manufacturing or recommender systems, operate in an environment where there is either little uncertainty, or zero risk of catastrophe. As companies and…
Distributionally robust offline reinforcement learning (RL) aims to find a policy that performs the best under the worst environment within an uncertainty set using an offline dataset collected from a nominal model. While recent advances in…
Interactive assessments generate sequential process data that are not well handled by conventional item response models. Existing MDP-based measurement approaches, such as the Markov decision process measurement model (MDP-MM, LaMar, 2018),…
Safe exploration remains a fundamental challenge in reinforcement learning (RL), limiting the deployment of RL agents in the real world. We propose Sampling-Based Safe Reinforcement Learning (SBSRL), a model-based RL algorithm that…
Robustness has been extensively studied in reinforcement learning (RL) to handle various forms of uncertainty such as random perturbations, rare events, and malicious attacks. In this work, we consider one critical type of robustness…
The ability to direct a Probabilistic Boolean Network (PBN) to a desired state is important to applications such as targeted therapeutics in cancer biology. Reinforcement Learning (RL) has been proposed as a framework that solves a…
We consider the problem of risk-sensitive control in a reinforcement learning (RL) framework. In particular, we aim to find a risk-optimal policy by maximizing the distortion riskmetric (DRM) of the discounted reward in a finite horizon…
Reinforcement learning (RL) often necessitates a meticulous Markov Decision Process (MDP) design tailored to each task. This work aims to address this challenge by proposing a systematic approach to behavior synthesis and control for…
Due to limited resources and public safety concerns, deep reinforcement learning (RL) agents for many cyber-physical systems (e.g., autonomous vehicles) are first trained in simulators. However, when deployed in real world environments,…
Model Predictive Control (MPC) is a powerful framework for constrained control, but its performance and safety can be severely degraded when the prediction model is learned online and thus remains uncertain. In this work, we develop a…
Complex mechanical systems such as vehicle powertrains are inherently subject to multiple nonlinearities and uncertainties arising from parametric variations. Modeling errors are therefore unavoidable, making the transfer of control systems…
A Budgeted Markov Decision Process (BMDP) is an extension of a Markov Decision Process to critical applications requiring safety constraints. It relies on a notion of risk implemented in the shape of a cost signal constrained to lie below…
We study reinforcement learning (RL) with linear function approximation in Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) satisfying \emph{linear Bellman completeness} -- a fundamental setting where the Bellman backup of any linear value function remains…
Reinforcement learning (RL) is a powerful framework for optimal decision-making and control but often lacks provable guarantees for safety-critical applications. In this paper, we introduce a novel recovery-based shielding framework that…
Dynamic portfolio optimization is the process of sequentially allocating wealth to a collection of assets in some consecutive trading periods, based on investors' return-risk profile. Automating this process with machine learning remains a…
Efficiently tackling multiple tasks within complex environment, such as those found in robot manipulation, remains an ongoing challenge in robotics and an opportunity for data-driven solutions, such as reinforcement learning (RL).…
Bayesian reinforcement learning (BRL) encodes prior knowledge of the world in a model and represents uncertainty in model parameters by maintaining a probability distribution over them. This paper presents Monte Carlo BRL (MC-BRL), a simple…
Reactive synthesis algorithms allow automatic construction of policies to control an environment modeled as a Markov Decision Process (MDP) that are optimal with respect to high-level temporal logic specifications. However, they assume that…
Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has proven effective for enhancing Large Language Models (LLMs) on complex reasoning tasks. However, existing methods suffer from an exploration dilemma: the sharply peaked initial…
We study reinforcement learning under model misspecification, where we do not have access to the true environment but only to a reasonably close approximation to it. We address this problem by extending the framework of robust MDPs to the…