Related papers: Success Conditioning as Policy Improvement: The Op…
We consider the problem of reinforcement learning when provided with (1) a baseline control policy and (2) a set of constraints that the learner must satisfy. The baseline policy can arise from demonstration data or a teacher agent and may…
Recommender systems predict what items a user will interact with next, based on their past interactions. The problem is often approached through supervised learning, but recent advancements have shifted towards policy optimization of…
Proximal policy optimization (PPO) is one of the most successful deep reinforcement-learning methods, achieving state-of-the-art performance across a wide range of challenging tasks. However, its optimization behavior is still far from…
We work towards a unifying paradigm for accelerating policy optimization methods in reinforcement learning (RL) by integrating foresight in the policy improvement step via optimistic and adaptive updates. Leveraging the connection between…
Prior work has proposed a simple strategy for reinforcement learning (RL): label experience with the outcomes achieved in that experience, and then imitate the relabeled experience. These outcome-conditioned imitation learning methods are…
A decision maker typically (i) incorporates training data to learn about the relative effectiveness of treatments, and (ii) chooses an implementation mechanism that implies an ``optimal'' predicted outcome distribution according to some…
A key problem in reinforcement learning for control with general function approximators (such as deep neural networks and other nonlinear functions) is that, for many algorithms employed in practice, updates to the policy or $Q$-function…
Solving tasks in Reinforcement Learning is no easy feat. As the goal of the agent is to maximize the accumulated reward, it often learns to exploit loopholes and misspecifications in the reward signal resulting in unwanted behavior. While…
Policy optimization is a core component of reinforcement learning (RL), and most existing RL methods directly optimize parameters of a policy based on maximizing the expected total reward, or its surrogate. Though often achieving…
Trust Region Policy Optimization (TRPO) and Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) are among the most successful policy gradient approaches in deep reinforcement learning (RL). While these methods achieve state-of-the-art performance across a…
Reinforcement learning offers the promise of automating the acquisition of complex behavioral skills. However, compared to commonly used and well-understood supervised learning methods, reinforcement learning algorithms can be brittle,…
Leveraging machine learning methods to solve constraint satisfaction problems has shown promising, but they are mostly limited to a static situation where the problem description is completely known and fixed from the beginning. In this…
Reinforcement learning (RL) problems over general state and action spaces are notoriously challenging. In contrast to the tableau setting, one can not enumerate all the states and then iteratively update the policies for each state. This…
One of the fundamental challenges for offline reinforcement learning (RL) is ensuring robustness to data distribution. Whether the data originates from a near-optimal policy or not, we anticipate that an algorithm should demonstrate its…
Many problems in Reinforcement Learning (RL) seek an optimal policy with large discrete multidimensional yet unordered action spaces; these include problems in randomized allocation of resources such as placements of multiple security…
In many real-world applications, reinforcement learning (RL) agents might have to solve multiple tasks, each one typically modeled via a reward function. If reward functions are expressed linearly, and the agent has previously learned a set…
Linear dynamical systems that obey stochastic differential equations are canonical models. While optimal control of known systems has a rich literature, the problem is technically hard under model uncertainty and there are hardly any…
We tackle the issue of finding a good policy when the number of policy updates is limited. This is done by approximating the expected policy reward as a sequence of concave lower bounds which can be efficiently maximized, drastically…
Optimal control problems are inherently hard to solve as the optimization must be performed simultaneously with updating the underlying system. Starting from an initial guess, Howard's policy improvement algorithm separates the step of…
When modifying existing policies in high-risk settings, it is often necessary to ensure with high certainty that the newly proposed policy improves upon a baseline, such as the status quo. In this work, we consider the problem of safe…