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Reinforcement learning (RL) under changing environment models many real-world applications via nonstationary Markov Decision Processes (MDPs), and hence gains considerable interest. However, theoretical studies on nonstationary MDPs in the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-11 Yuan Cheng , Jing Yang , Yingbin Liang

The distributionally robust Markov Decision Process (MDP) approach asks for a distributionally robust policy that achieves the maximal expected total reward under the most adversarial distribution of uncertain parameters. In this paper, we…

Systems and Control · Computer Science 2018-10-10 Zhi Chen , Pengqian Yu , William B. Haskell

We study the statistical limits of Imitation Learning (IL) in episodic Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) with a state space $\mathcal{S}$. We focus on the known-transition setting where the learner is provided a dataset of $N$ length-$H$…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-26 Nived Rajaraman , Yanjun Han , Lin F. Yang , Kannan Ramchandran , Jiantao Jiao

We cast episodic Markov decision process (MDP) planning as Bayesian inference over policies. A policy is treated as the latent variable and is assigned an unnormalized probability of optimality that is monotone in its expected return,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-14 David Tolpin

This paper proposes a novel termination criterion, termed the advantage gap function, for finite state and action Markov decision processes (MDP) and reinforcement learning (RL). By incorporating this advantage gap function into the design…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Caleb Ju , Guanghui Lan

We study model-based reinforcement learning with non-linear function approximation where the transition function of the underlying Markov decision process (MDP) is given by a multinomial logistic (MNL) model. We develop a provably efficient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-15 Jaehyun Park , Junyeop Kwon , Dabeen Lee

We analyze the Bayesian regret of the Gaussian process posterior sampling reinforcement learning (GP-PSRL) algorithm. Posterior sampling is an effective heuristic for decision-making under uncertainty that has been used to develop…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-10 Hamish Flynn , Joe Watson , Ingmar Posner , Jan Peters

Robust Markov decision processes (RMDPs) extend standard Markov decision processes (MDPs) to account for uncertainty in the transition probabilities. RMDPs have an uncertainty set that defines a set of possible transition functions, each of…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2026-04-30 Marnix Suilen , Guillermo A. Pérez

We study the problem of reinforcement learning in infinite-horizon discounted linear Markov decision processes (MDPs), and propose the first computationally efficient algorithm achieving rate-optimal regret guarantees in this setting. Our…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-16 Antoine Moulin , Gergely Neu , Luca Viano

We study reinforcement learning with delayed state observation, where the agent observes the current state after some random number of time steps. We propose an algorithm that combines the augmentation method and the upper confidence bound…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-05 Harin Lee , Kevin Jamieson

In this work, we study algorithms for learning in infinite-horizon undiscounted Markov decision processes (MDPs) with function approximation. We first show that the regret analysis of the Politex algorithm (a version of regularized policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-26 Nevena Lazic , Dong Yin , Yasin Abbasi-Yadkori , Csaba Szepesvari

We present a general framework for applying learning algorithms and heuristical guidance to the verification of Markov decision processes (MDPs). The primary goal of our techniques is to improve performance by avoiding an exhaustive…

Value iteration is a commonly used and empirically competitive method in solving many Markov decision process problems. However, it is known that value iteration has only pseudo-polynomial complexity in general. We establish a somewhat…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2013-01-07 Omid Madani

We tackle average-reward infinite-horizon POMDPs with an unknown transition model but a known observation model, a setting that has been previously addressed in two limiting ways: (i) frequentist methods relying on suboptimal stochastic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-09 Alessio Russo , Alberto Maria Metelli , Marcello Restelli

Policy Iteration (PI) is a widely used family of algorithms to compute optimal policies for Markov Decision Problems (MDPs). We derive upper bounds on the running time of PI on Deterministic MDPs (DMDPs): the class of MDPs in which every…

Discrete Mathematics · Computer Science 2023-10-10 Ritesh Goenka , Eashan Gupta , Sushil Khyalia , Pratyush Agarwal , Mulinti Shaik Wajid , Shivaram Kalyanakrishnan

We consider online learning for episodic stochastically constrained Markov decision processes (CMDPs), which plays a central role in ensuring the safety of reinforcement learning. Here the loss function can vary arbitrarily across the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-19 Shuang Qiu , Xiaohan Wei , Zhuoran Yang , Jieping Ye , Zhaoran Wang

We consider the stochastic shortest path (SSP) problem for succinct Markov decision processes (MDPs), where the MDP consists of a set of variables, and a set of nondeterministic rules that update the variables. First, we show that several…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2018-07-18 Krishnendu Chatterjee , Hongfei Fu , Amir Kafshdar Goharshady , Nastaran Okati

In probably approximately correct (PAC) reinforcement learning (RL), an agent is required to identify an $\epsilon$-optimal policy with probability $1-\delta$. While minimax optimal algorithms exist for this problem, its instance-dependent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-25 Andrea Tirinzoni , Aymen Al-Marjani , Emilie Kaufmann

We consider a novel queuing problem where the decision-maker must choose to accept or reject randomly arriving tasks into a no buffer queue which are processed by $N$ identical servers. Each task has a price, which is a positive real…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-16 Marc Rigter , Danial Dervovic , Parisa Hassanzadeh , Jason Long , Parisa Zehtabi , Daniele Magazzeni

This work considers the sample complexity of obtaining an $\varepsilon$-optimal policy in an average reward Markov Decision Process (AMDP), given access to a generative model (simulator). When the ground-truth MDP is weakly communicating,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-02 Jinghan Wang , Mengdi Wang , Lin F. Yang