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 -feasibility and -optimality, and we establish a sample complexities of and 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}
}