Related papers: Ergodicity in reinforcement learning
Envisioned application areas for reinforcement learning (RL) include autonomous driving, precision agriculture, and finance, which all require RL agents to make decisions in the real world. A significant challenge hindering the adoption of…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) remains a central optimisation framework in machine learning. Although RL agents can converge to optimal solutions, the definition of ``optimality'' depends on the environment's statistical properties. The…
Reward is the driving force for reinforcement-learning agents. This paper is dedicated to understanding the expressivity of reward as a way to capture tasks that we would want an agent to perform. We frame this study around three new…
Continual reinforcement learning (continual RL) seeks to formalize the notions of lifelong learning and endless adaptation in RL. In particular, the aim of continual RL is to develop RL agents that can maintain a careful balance between…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) heavily relies on the careful design of the reward function. However, accurately assigning rewards to each state-action pair in Long-Term Reinforcement Learning (LTRL) tasks remains a significant challenge. As a…
Finding optimal policies which maximize long term rewards of Markov Decision Processes requires the use of dynamic programming and backward induction to solve the Bellman optimality equation. However, many real-world problems require…
Reinforcement learning for embodied agents is a challenging problem. The accumulated reward to be optimized is often a very rugged function, and gradient methods are impaired by many local optimizers. We demonstrate, in an experimental…
The standard feedback model of reinforcement learning requires revealing the reward of every visited state-action pair. However, in practice, it is often the case that such frequent feedback is not available. In this work, we take a first…
Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms typically optimize the expected cumulative reward, i.e., the expected value of the sum of scalar rewards an agent receives over the course of a trajectory. The expected value averages the performance…
In Reinforcement Learning (RL), it is commonly assumed that an immediate reward signal is generated for each action taken by the agent, helping the agent maximize cumulative rewards to obtain the optimal policy. However, in many real-world…
We study multi-objective reinforcement learning with nonlinear preferences over trajectories. That is, we maximize the expected value of a nonlinear function over accumulated rewards (expected scalarized return or ESR) in a multi-objective…
In this work, we show existence of invariant ergodic measure for switched linear dynamical systems (SLDSs) under a norm-stability assumption of system dynamics in some unbounded subset of $\mathbb{R}^{n}$. Consequently, given a stationary…
Markov decision processes (MDPs) are used to model a wide variety of applications ranging from game playing over robotics to finance. Their optimal policy typically maximizes the expected sum of rewards given at each step of the decision…
Option-critic learning is a general-purpose reinforcement learning (RL) framework that aims to address the issue of long term credit assignment by leveraging temporal abstractions. However, when dealing with extended timescales, discounting…
In dynamic programming and reinforcement learning, the policy for the sequential decision making of an agent in a stochastic environment is usually determined by expressing the goal as a scalar reward function and seeking a policy that…
In this paper, we propose a reinforcement learning-based algorithm for trajectory optimization for constrained dynamical systems. This problem is motivated by the fact that for most robotic systems, the dynamics may not always be known.…
The objective of a reinforcement learning agent is to behave so as to maximise the sum of a suitable scalar function of state: the reward. These rewards are typically given and immutable. In this paper, we instead consider the proposition…
Reward design is a fundamental problem in reinforcement learning (RL). A misspecified or poorly designed reward can result in low sample efficiency and undesired behaviors. In this paper, we propose the idea of programmatic reward design,…
There exist a number of reinforcement learning algorithms which learnby climbing the gradient of expected reward. Their long-runconvergence has been proved, even in partially observableenvironments with non-deterministic actions, and…
For most reinforcement learning approaches, the learning is performed by maximizing an accumulative reward that is expectedly and manually defined for specific tasks. However, in real world, rewards are emergent phenomena from the complex…