English
Related papers

Related papers: Stochastic Primal-Dual Methods and Sample Complexi…

200 papers

We study reinforcement learning by combining recent advances in regularized linear programming formulations with the classical theory of stochastic approximation. Motivated by the challenge of designing algorithms that leverage off-policy…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-15 Axel Friedrich Wolter , Tobias Sutter

The continuous nature of belief states in POMDPs presents significant computational challenges in learning the optimal policy. In this paper, we consider an approach that solves a Partially Observable Reinforcement Learning (PORL) problem…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-15 Ameya Anjarlekar , Rasoul Etesami , R Srikant

Markov decision processes (MDPs) describe sequential decision-making processes; MDP policies return for every state in that process an advised action. Classical algorithms can efficiently compute policies that are optimal with respect to,…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2025-05-23 Roman Andriushchenko , Milan Češka , Sebastian Junges , Filip Macák

We present an efficient robust value iteration for \texttt{s}-rectangular robust Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) with a time complexity comparable to standard (non-robust) MDPs which is significantly faster than any existing method. We do…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-01 Navdeep Kumar , Kfir Levy , Kaixin Wang , Shie Mannor

Existing work on linear constrained Markov decision processes (CMDPs) has primarily focused on stochastic settings, where the losses and costs are either fixed or drawn from fixed distributions. However, such formulations are inherently…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Kihyun Yu , Seoungbin Bae , Dabeen Lee

We consider large-scale Markov decision processes with an unknown cost function and address the problem of learning a policy from a finite set of expert demonstrations. We assume that the learner is not allowed to interact with the expert…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-30 Angeliki Kamoutsi , Goran Banjac , John Lygeros

We develop a regression based primal-dual martingale approach for solving finite time horizon MDPs with general state and action space. As a result, our method allows for the construction of tight upper and lower biased approximations of…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2022-10-05 Denis Belomestny , John Schoenmakers

Explicit exploration in the action space was assumed to be indispensable for online policy gradient methods to avoid a drastic degradation in sample complexity, for solving general reinforcement learning problems over finite state and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-22 Yan Li , Guanghui Lan

In this paper we consider the problem of learning an $\epsilon$-optimal policy for a discounted Markov Decision Process (MDP). Given an MDP with $S$ states, $A$ actions, the discount factor $\gamma \in (0,1)$, and an approximation threshold…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-25 Zihan Zhang , Yuan Zhou , Xiangyang Ji

Policy gradient methods are among the most effective methods in challenging reinforcement learning problems with large state and/or action spaces. However, little is known about even their most basic theoretical convergence properties,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-16 Alekh Agarwal , Sham M. Kakade , Jason D. Lee , Gaurav Mahajan

Primal-dual methods have a natural application in Safe Reinforcement Learning (SRL), posed as a constrained policy optimization problem. In practice however, applying primal-dual methods to SRL is challenging, due to the inter-dependency of…

We consider stochastic strongly-convex-strongly-concave (SCSC) saddle point (SP) problems which frequently arise in applications ranging from distributionally robust learning to game theory and fairness in machine learning. We focus on the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-07-17 Yassine Laguel , Necdet Serhat Aybat , Mert Gürbüzbalaban

We present a novel accelerated primal-dual (APD) method for solving a class of deterministic and stochastic saddle point problems (SPP). The basic idea of this algorithm is to incorporate a multi-step acceleration scheme into the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2013-09-24 Yunmei Chen , Guanghui Lan , Yuyuan Ouyang

In this work, we introduce a stochastic maximum principle (SMP) approach for solving the reinforcement learning problem with the assumption that the unknowns in the environment can be parameterized based on physics knowledge. For the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-06-14 Richard Archibald , Feng Bao , Jiongmin Yong

Regularized empirical risk minimization problem with linear predictor appears frequently in machine learning. In this paper, we propose a new stochastic primal-dual method to solve this class of problems. Different from existing methods,…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2018-11-06 Conghui Tan , Tong Zhang , Shiqian Ma , Ji Liu

In this paper we propose a stochastic primal dual fixed point method (SPDFP) for solving the sum of two proper lower semi-continuous convex function and one of which is composite. The method is based on the primal dual fixed point method…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-04-21 YaNanZhu , XiaoqunZhang

Markov decision processes (MDPs) are a popular model for performance analysis and optimization of stochastic systems. The parameters of stochastic behavior of MDPs are estimates from empirical observations of a system; their values are not…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-10-26 Dimitri Scheftelowitsch , Peter Buchholz , Vahid Hashemi , Holger Hermanns

We study the offline data-driven sequential decision making problem in the framework of Markov decision process (MDP). In order to enhance the generalizability and adaptivity of the learned policy, we propose to evaluate each policy by a…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2021-11-11 Zhengling Qi , Peng Liao

We study offline reinforcement learning (RL) with linear MDPs under the infinite-horizon discounted setting which aims to learn a policy that maximizes the expected discounted cumulative reward using a pre-collected dataset. Existing…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-06-04 Kihyuk Hong , Ambuj Tewari

We study the computational complexity of the infinite-horizon discounted-reward Markov Decision Problem (MDP) with a finite state space $|\mathcal{S}|$ and a finite action space $|\mathcal{A}|$. We show that any randomized algorithm needs a…

Computational Complexity · Computer Science 2017-05-24 Yichen Chen , Mengdi Wang