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Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) have been used to formulate many decision-making problems in science and engineering. The objective is to synthesize the best decision (action selection) policies to maximize expected rewards (minimize…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2015-07-08 Mahmoud El Chamie , Behcet Acikmese

In average reward Markov decision processes, state-of-the-art algorithms for regret minimization follow a well-established framework: They are model-based, optimistic and episodic. First, they maintain a confidence region from which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-01 Victor Boone , Bruno Gaujal

In most common settings of Markov Decision Process (MDP), an agent evaluate a policy based on expectation of (discounted) sum of rewards. However in many applications this criterion might not be suitable from two perspective: first, in risk…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-05-11 Yan Li , Zhaohan Sun

The goal of a traditional Markov decision process (MDP) is to maximize expected cumulative reward over a defined horizon (possibly infinite). In many applications, however, a decision maker may be interested in optimizing a specific…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-16 Xiaocheng Li , Huaiyang Zhong , Margaret L. Brandeau

This paper studies the optimization of Markov decision processes (MDPs) from a risk-seeking perspective, where the risk is measured by conditional value-at-risk (CVaR). The objective is to find a policy that maximizes the long-run CVaR of…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-12-05 Li Xia , Zhihui Yu , Peter W. Glynn

We present an algorithm based on the \emph{Optimism in the Face of Uncertainty} (OFU) principle which is able to learn Reinforcement Learning (RL) modeled by Markov decision process (MDP) with finite state-action space efficiently. By…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-01 Zihan Zhang , Xiangyang Ji

This paper addresses the problem of optimal control of robotic sensing systems aimed at autonomous information gathering in scenarios such as environmental monitoring, search and rescue, and surveillance and reconnaissance. The information…

Systems and Control · Computer Science 2016-01-28 Mikko Lauri , Nikolay Atanasov , George J. Pappas , Risto Ritala

We consider the batch (off-line) policy learning problem in the infinite horizon Markov Decision Process. Motivated by mobile health applications, we focus on learning a policy that maximizes the long-term average reward. We propose a…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2022-09-20 Peng Liao , Zhengling Qi , Runzhe Wan , Predrag Klasnja , Susan Murphy

Reinforcement learning (RL) typically models the interaction between the agent and environment as a Markov decision process (MDP), where the rewards that guide the agent's behavior are always observable. However, in many real-world…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-05-15 Montaser Mohammedalamen , Michael Bowling

The optimized certainty equivalent (OCE) is a family of risk measures that cover important examples such as entropic risk, conditional value-at-risk and mean-variance models. In this paper, we propose a new episodic risk-sensitive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-09 Wenhao Xu , Xuefeng Gao , Xuedong He

We develop a model selection approach to tackle reinforcement learning with adversarial corruption in both transition and reward. For finite-horizon tabular MDPs, without prior knowledge on the total amount of corruption, our algorithm…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-31 Chen-Yu Wei , Christoph Dann , Julian Zimmert

In this paper we provide faster algorithms for approximately solving discounted Markov Decision Processes in multiple parameter regimes. Given a discounted Markov Decision Process (DMDP) with $|S|$ states, $|A|$ actions, discount factor…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2020-12-24 Aaron Sidford , Mengdi Wang , Xian Wu , Yinyu Ye

We study Markov decision processes (MDPs) with multiple limit-average (or mean-payoff) functions. We consider two different objectives, namely, expectation and satisfaction objectives. Given an MDP with k limit-average functions, in the…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2015-07-01 Tomáš Brázdil , Václav Brožek , Krishnendu Chatterjee , Vojtěch Forejt , Antonín Kučera

Information-directed sampling (IDS) has revealed its potential as a data-efficient algorithm for reinforcement learning (RL). However, theoretical understanding of IDS for Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) is still limited. We develop novel…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-28 Botao Hao , Tor Lattimore

Policy optimization methods are popular reinforcement learning algorithms in practice. Recent works have built theoretical foundation for them by proving $\sqrt{T}$ regret bounds even when the losses are adversarial. Such bounds are tight…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-21 Christoph Dann , Chen-Yu Wei , Julian Zimmert

We study online learning in \emph{constrained MDPs} (CMDPs), focusing on the goal of attaining sublinear strong regret and strong cumulative constraint violation. Differently from their standard (weak) counterparts, these metrics do not…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-04 Francesco Emanuele Stradi , Matteo Castiglioni , Alberto Marchesi , Nicola Gatti

This paper studies the problem of data collection for policy evaluation in Markov decision processes (MDPs). In policy evaluation, we are given a target policy and asked to estimate the expected cumulative reward it will obtain in an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-22 Subhojyoti Mukherjee , Josiah P. Hanna , Robert Nowak

We study infinite-horizon average-reward constrained Markov decision processes (CMDPs) under the weakly communicating assumption. Our contributions are twofold. First, we establish strong duality for weakly communicating average-reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Kihyun Yu , Beomhan Baek , Dabeen Lee

This paper studies the problem of Anytime-Competitive Markov Decision Process (A-CMDP). Existing works on Constrained Markov Decision Processes (CMDPs) aim to optimize the expected reward while constraining the expected cost over random…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-06 Jianyi Yang , Pengfei Li , Tongxin Li , Adam Wierman , Shaolei Ren

Obtaining no-regret guarantees for reinforcement learning (RL) in the case of problems with continuous state and/or action spaces is still one of the major open challenges in the field. Recently, a variety of solutions have been proposed,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-07 Davide Maran , Alberto Maria Metelli , Matteo Papini , Marcello Restell