Related papers: Policy Gradient Methods for Non-Markovian Reinforc…
We consider an improper reinforcement learning setting where a learner is given $M$ base controllers for an unknown Markov decision process, and wishes to combine them optimally to produce a potentially new controller that can outperform…
Many practical decision-making problems involve tasks whose success depends on the entire system history, rather than on achieving a state with desired properties. Markovian Reinforcement Learning (RL) approaches are not suitable for such…
We propose policy gradient algorithms for solving a risk-sensitive reinforcement learning (RL) problem in on-policy as well as off-policy settings. We consider episodic Markov decision processes, and model the risk using the broad class of…
Motivated by broad applications in machine learning, we study the popular accelerated stochastic gradient descent (ASGD) algorithm for solving (possibly nonconvex) optimization problems. We characterize the finite-time performance of this…
We introduce a reinforcement learning method for a class of non-Markov systems; our approach extends the actor-critic framework given by Rose et al. [New J. Phys. 23 013013 (2021)] for obtaining scaled cumulant generating functions…
In this paper we consider the problem of how a reinforcement learning agent tasked with solving a set of related Markov decision processes can use knowledge acquired early in its lifetime to improve its ability to more rapidly solve novel,…
We introduce Dynamic Contextual Markov Decision Processes (DCMDPs), a novel reinforcement learning framework for history-dependent environments that generalizes the contextual MDP framework to handle non-Markov environments, where contexts…
We consider discounted infinite-horizon constrained Markov decision processes (CMDPs), where the goal is to find an optimal policy that maximizes the expected cumulative reward while satisfying expected cumulative constraints. Motivated by…
A tenet of reinforcement learning is that the agent always observes rewards. However, this is not true in many realistic settings, e.g., a human observer may not always be available to provide rewards, sensors may be limited or…
In high-stake scenarios like medical treatment and auto-piloting, it's risky or even infeasible to collect online experimental data to train the agent. Simulation-based training can alleviate this issue, but may suffer from its inherent…
We study the problem of computing an optimal policy of an infinite-horizon discounted constrained Markov decision process (constrained MDP). Despite the popularity of Lagrangian-based policy search methods used in practice, the oscillation…
In many sequential decision-making problems one is interested in minimizing an expected cumulative cost while taking into account \emph{risk}, i.e., increased awareness of events of small probability and high consequences. Accordingly, the…
We investigate model-based reinforcement learning in contextual Markov decision processes (C-MDPs) in which the context is unobserved and induces confounding in the offline dataset. In such settings, conventional model-learning methods are…
Multi-agent deep reinforcement learning makes optimal decisions dependent on system states observed by agents, but any uncertainty on the observations may mislead agents to take wrong actions. The Mean-Field Actor-Critic reinforcement…
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…
Inverse reinforcement learning is the problem of inferring a reward function from an optimal policy or demonstrations by an expert. In this work, it is assumed that the reward is expressed as a reward machine whose transitions depend on…
Reinforcement learning methods require careful design involving a reward function to obtain the desired action policy for a given task. In the absence of hand-crafted reward functions, prior work on the topic has proposed several methods…
We study Markov decision processes (MDPs), where agents have direct control over when and how they gather information, as formalized by action-contingent noiselessly observable MDPs (ACNO-MPDs). In these models, actions consist of two…
The standard Markov Decision Process (MDP) formulation hinges on the assumption that an action is executed immediately after it was chosen. However, assuming it is often unrealistic and can lead to catastrophic failures in applications such…
In this paper, we propose a reinforcement learning algorithm to solve a multi-agent Markov decision process (MMDP). The goal, inspired by Blackwell's Approachability Theorem, is to lower the time average cost of each agent to below a…