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Reinforcement learning (RL) has been successfully applied to solve the problem of finding obstacle-free paths for autonomous agents operating in stochastic and uncertain environments. However, when the underlying stochastic dynamics of the…
Deep reinforcement learning agents achieve state-of-the-art performance in a wide range of simulated control tasks. However, successful applications to real-world problems remain limited. One reason for this dichotomy is because the learnt…
Training a reinforcement learning agent on-policy means collecting fresh experience at every update, and that experience comes with a hidden problem. Each state in a rollout is the direct output of the previous one, causally chained…
The subject of this paper is reinforcement learning. Policies are considered here that produce actions based on states and random elements autocorrelated in subsequent time instants. Consequently, an agent learns from experiments that are…
Decision-making under distribution shift is a central challenge in reinforcement learning (RL), where training and deployment environments differ. We study this problem through the lens of robust Markov decision processes (RMDPs), which…
Standard on-policy reinforcement learning relies on heuristic clipping to enforce trust regions, but this mechanism imposes a severe cost by indiscriminately truncating high-return yet high-divergence updates. We demonstrate that explicitly…
Deep reinforcement learning can learn effective policies for a wide range of tasks, but is notoriously difficult to use due to instability and sensitivity to hyperparameters. The reasons for this remain unclear. When using standard…
Existing batch size selection approaches in distributed machine learning rely on static allocation or simplistic heuristics that fail to adapt to heterogeneous, dynamic computing environments. We present DYNAMIX, a reinforcement learning…
Reinforcement learning (RL) has demonstrated the ability to maintain the plasticity of the policy throughout short-term training in aerial robot control. However, these policies have been shown to loss of plasticity when extended to…
Real-time inference is a challenge of real-world reinforcement learning due to temporal differences in time-varying environments: the system collects data from the past, updates the decision model in the present, and deploys it in the…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) can effectively learn complex policies. However, learning these policies often demands extensive trial-and-error interactions with the environment. In many real-world scenarios, this approach is not practical due…
Reinforcement learning has been central to recent advances in large language model reasoning, but most algorithms rely on on-policy training that demands fresh rollouts at every update, limiting efficiency and scalability. Asynchronous RL…
This paper studies reinforcement learning (RL) in doubly inhomogeneous environments under temporal non-stationarity and subject heterogeneity. In a number of applications, it is commonplace to encounter datasets generated by system dynamics…
Reinforcement learning methods often produce brittle policies -- policies that perform well during training, but generalize poorly beyond their direct training experience, thus becoming unstable under small disturbances. To address this…
While reinforcement learning (RL) has been central to the recent success of large language models (LLMs), RL optimization is notoriously unstable, especially when compared to supervised fine-tuning (SFT). In this work, we investigate the…
We address the problem of production planning and distribution in multi-echelon supply chains. We consider uncertain demands and lead times which makes the problem stochastic and non-linear. A Markov Decision Process formulation and a…
Recent studies have shown that reinforcement learning (RL) models are vulnerable in various noisy scenarios. For instance, the observed reward channel is often subject to noise in practice (e.g., when rewards are collected through sensors),…
Real-world applications require RL algorithms to act safely. During learning process, it is likely that the agent executes sub-optimal actions that may lead to unsafe/poor states of the system. Exploration is particularly brittle in…
We provide a new perspective to understand why reinforcement learning (RL) struggles with robustness and generalization. We show, by examples, that local optimal policies may contain unstable control for some dynamic parameters and…
Reinforcement learning (RL) policies often fail under dynamics that differ from training, a gap not fully addressed by domain randomization or existing adversarial RL methods. Distributionally robust RL provides a formal remedy but still…