Related papers: Bounds on sample size for policy evaluation in Mar…

Estimation of individual treatment effects is commonly used as the basis for contextual decision making in fields such as healthcare, education, and economics. However, it is often sufficient for the decision maker to have estimates of…

In addition to their undisputed success in solving classical optimization problems, neuroevolutionary and population-based algorithms have become an alternative to standard reinforcement learning methods. However, evolutionary methods often…

As a paradigm for sequential decision making in unknown environments, reinforcement learning (RL) has received a flurry of attention in recent years. However, the explosion of model complexity in emerging applications and the presence of…

We consider the problem of steering a system with unknown, stochastic dynamics to satisfy a rich, temporally layered task given as a signal temporal logic formula. We represent the system as a Markov decision process in which the states are…

Markov decision processes are widely used for planning and verification in settings that combine controllable or adversarial choices with probabilistic behaviour. The standard analysis algorithm, value iteration, only provides a lower bound…

We study the problem of identifying the policy space of a learning agent, having access to a set of demonstrations generated by its optimal policy. We introduce an approach based on statistical testing to identify the set of policy…

The success of reinforcement learning in typical settings is predicated on Markovian assumptions on the reward signal by which an agent learns optimal policies. In recent years, the use of reward machines has relaxed this assumption by…

Experience replay is a core ingredient of modern deep reinforcement learning, yet its benefits in policy optimization are poorly understood beyond empirical heuristics. This paper develops a novel theoretical framework for experience replay…

Improving sample-efficiency and safety are crucial challenges when deploying reinforcement learning in high-stakes real world applications. We propose LAMBDA, a novel model-based approach for policy optimization in safety critical tasks…

Reinforcement Learning aims at identifying and evaluating efficient control policies from data. In many real-world applications, the learner is not allowed to experiment and cannot gather data in an online manner (this is the case when…

We consider the problem of off-policy evaluation in Markov decision processes. Off-policy evaluation is the task of evaluating the expected return of one policy with data generated by a different, behavior policy. Importance sampling is a…

This paper aims to establish an entropy-regularized value-based reinforcement learning method that can ensure the monotonic improvement of policies at each policy update. Unlike previously proposed lower-bounds on policy improvement in…

The objective comparison of Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms is notoriously complex as outcomes and benchmarking of performances of different RL approaches are critically sensitive to environmental design, reward structures, and…

Although in recent years reinforcement learning has become very popular the number of successful applications to different kinds of operations research problems is rather scarce. Reinforcement learning is based on the well-studied dynamic…

Constrained decision-making is essential for designing safe policies in real-world control systems, yet simulated environments often fail to capture real-world adversities. We consider the problem of learning a policy that will maximize the…

We study the optimal sample complexity in large-scale Reinforcement Learning (RL) problems with policy space generalization, i.e. the agent has a prior knowledge that the optimal policy lies in a known policy space. Existing results show…

Policy optimization is an effective reinforcement learning approach to solve continuous control tasks. Recent achievements have shown that alternating online and offline optimization is a successful choice for efficient trajectory reuse.…

Entropy regularization is commonly used to improve policy optimization in reinforcement learning. It is believed to help with \emph{exploration} by encouraging the selection of more stochastic policies. In this work, we analyze this claim…

Reinforcement Learning methods are capable of solving complex problems, but resulting policies might perform poorly in environments that are even slightly different. In robotics especially, training and deployment conditions often vary and…

Genomic selection (GS) is a technique that plant breeders use to select individuals to mate and produce new generations of species. Allocation of resources is a key factor in GS. At each selection cycle, breeders are facing the choice of…