Related papers: Reinforcement Learning with Linear Function Approx…
We present new algorithms for inverse reinforcement learning (IRL, or inverse optimal control) in convex optimization settings. We argue that finite-space IRL can be posed as a convex quadratic program under a Bayesian inference framework…
Reinforcement learning (RL) commonly relies on scalar rewards with limited ability to express temporal, conditional, or safety-critical goals, and can lead to reward hacking. Temporal logic expressible via the more general class of…
While reinforcement learning has made great improvements, state-of-the-art algorithms can still struggle with seemingly simple set-point feedback control problems. One reason for this is that the learned controller may not be able to excite…
Long-horizon tasks, which have a large discount factor, pose a challenge for most conventional reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms. Algorithms such as Value Iteration and Temporal Difference (TD) learning have a slow convergence rate and…
Learning to rank (LTR) plays a crucial role in various Information Retrieval (IR) tasks. Although supervised LTR methods based on fine-grained relevance labels (e.g., document-level annotations) have achieved significant success, their…
Learned representations in deep reinforcement learning (DRL) have to extract task-relevant information from complex observations, balancing between robustness to distraction and informativeness to the policy. Such stable and rich…
With the outstanding performance of policy gradient (PG) method in the reinforcement learning field, the convergence theory of it has aroused more and more interest recently. Meanwhile, the significant importance and abundant theoretical…
We present a set of model-free, reduced-dimensional reinforcement learning (RL) based optimal control designs for linear time-invariant singularly perturbed (SP) systems. We first present a state-feedback and output-feedback based RL…
Q-learning and SARSA are foundational reinforcement learning algorithms whose practical success depends critically on step-size calibration. Step-sizes that are too large can cause numerical instability, while step-sizes that are too small…
Temporal difference learning with linear function approximation is a popular method to obtain a low-dimensional approximation of the value function of a policy in a Markov Decision Process. We give a new interpretation of this method in…
We devise a distributional variant of gradient temporal-difference (TD) learning. Distributional reinforcement learning has been demonstrated to outperform the regular one in the recent study \citep{bellemare2017distributional}. In the…
Model-free approaches for reinforcement learning (RL) and continuous control find policies based only on past states and rewards, without fitting a model of the system dynamics. They are appealing as they are general purpose and easy to…
We study the problem of adaptive control of a high dimensional linear quadratic (LQ) system. Previous work established the asymptotic convergence to an optimal controller for various adaptive control schemes. More recently, for the average…
The application of reinforcement learning algorithms onto real life problems always bears the challenge of filtering the environmental state out of raw sensor readings. While most approaches use heuristics, biology suggests that there must…
The effectiveness of model-based versus model-free methods is a long-standing question in reinforcement learning (RL). Motivated by recent empirical success of RL on continuous control tasks, we study the sample complexity of popular…
The emerging field of Reinforcement Learning (RL) has led to impressive results in varied domains like strategy games, robotics, etc. This handout aims to give a simple introduction to RL from control perspective and discuss three possible…
Temporal-difference and Q-learning play a key role in deep reinforcement learning, where they are empowered by expressive nonlinear function approximators such as neural networks. At the core of their empirical successes is the learned…
Distributed optimal control is known to be challenging and can become intractable even for linear-quadratic regulator problems. In this work, we study a special class of such problems where distributed state feedback controllers can give…
Relative temporal-difference (TD) learning was introduced to mitigate the slow convergence of TD methods when the discount factor approaches one by subtracting a baseline from the temporal-difference update. While this idea has been studied…
The goal of this manuscript is to conduct a controltheoretic analysis of Temporal Difference (TD) learning algorithms. TD-learning serves as a cornerstone in the realm of reinforcement learning, offering a methodology for approximating the…