English

Primal-Only Actor Critic Algorithm for Robust Constrained Average Cost MDPs

Machine Learning 2025-11-11 v1

Abstract

In this work, we study the problem of finding robust and safe policies in Robust Constrained Average-Cost Markov Decision Processes (RCMDPs). A key challenge in this setting is the lack of strong duality, which prevents the direct use of standard primal-dual methods for constrained RL. Additional difficulties arise from the average-cost setting, where the Robust Bellman operator is not a contraction under any norm. To address these challenges, we propose an actor-critic algorithm for Average-Cost RCMDPs. We show that our method achieves both ϵ\epsilon-feasibility and ϵ\epsilon-optimality, and we establish a sample complexities of O~(ϵ4)\tilde{O}\left(\epsilon^{-4}\right) and O~(ϵ6)\tilde{O}\left(\epsilon^{-6}\right) with and without slackness assumption, which is comparable to the discounted setting.

Cite

@article{arxiv.2511.05758,
  title  = {Primal-Only Actor Critic Algorithm for Robust Constrained Average Cost MDPs},
  author = {Anirudh Satheesh and Sooraj Sathish and Swetha Ganesh and Keenan Powell and Vaneet Aggarwal},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2511.05758},
  year   = {2025}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T07:27:14.407Z