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A central issue lying at the heart of online reinforcement learning (RL) is data efficiency. While a number of recent works achieved asymptotically minimal regret in online RL, the optimality of these results is only guaranteed in a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-30 Zihan Zhang , Yuxin Chen , Jason D. Lee , Simon S. Du

We study infinite-horizon average-reward constrained Markov decision processes (CMDPs) under the unichain assumption and general policy parameterizations. Existing regret analyses for constrained reinforcement learning largely rely on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Anirudh Satheesh , Vaneet Aggarwal

We consider the problem of reinforcement learning under safety requirements, in which an agent is trained to complete a given task, typically formalized as the maximization of a reward signal over time, while concurrently avoiding…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-09-25 Tu-Hoa Pham , Giovanni De Magistris , Don Joven Agravante , Subhajit Chaudhury , Asim Munawar , Ryuki Tachibana

We consider the setting of iterative learning control, or model-based policy learning in the presence of uncertain, time-varying dynamics. In this setting, we propose a new performance metric, planning regret, which replaces the standard…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-01 Naman Agarwal , Elad Hazan , Anirudha Majumdar , Karan Singh

Many policy-based reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms can be viewed as instantiations of approximate policy iteration (PI), i.e., where policy improvement and policy evaluation are both performed approximately. In applications where the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-29 Yashaswini Murthy , Mehrdad Moharrami , R. Srikant

In recent years, significant attention has been directed towards learning average-reward Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). However, existing algorithms either suffer from sub-optimal regret guarantees or computational inefficiencies. In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-04 Victor Boone , Zihan Zhang

We propose a model-free reinforcement learning algorithm inspired by the popular randomized least squares value iteration (RLSVI) algorithm as well as the optimism principle. Unlike existing upper-confidence-bound (UCB) based approaches,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-27 Haque Ishfaq , Qiwen Cui , Viet Nguyen , Alex Ayoub , Zhuoran Yang , Zhaoran Wang , Doina Precup , Lin F. Yang

The promise of reinforcement learning is to solve complex sequential decision problems autonomously by specifying a high-level reward function only. However, reinforcement learning algorithms struggle when, as is often the case, simple and…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-09-17 Adrien Ecoffet , Joost Huizinga , Joel Lehman , Kenneth O. Stanley , Jeff Clune

Recently, model-free reinforcement learning has attracted research attention due to its simplicity, memory and computation efficiency, and the flexibility to combine with function approximation. In this paper, we propose Exploration…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-10 Mehdi Jafarnia-Jahromi , Chen-Yu Wei , Rahul Jain , Haipeng Luo

For many applications of reinforcement learning it can be more convenient to specify both a reward function and constraints, rather than trying to design behavior through the reward function. For example, systems that physically interact…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-05-31 Joshua Achiam , David Held , Aviv Tamar , Pieter Abbeel

We study online prediction where regret of the algorithm is measured against a benchmark defined via evolving constraints. This framework captures online prediction on graphs, as well as other prediction problems with combinatorial…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-06-15 Alexander Rakhlin , Karthik Sridharan

Policy learning in modern operations environments faces a fundamental tension between limited operational data and the large, often continuous, state and action spaces over which good decisions must be identified and deployed. We study…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-05-27 Shengbo Wang , Jose Blanchet , Peter Glynn

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has gained substantial attention across diverse application domains and theoretical investigations. Existing literature on RL theory largely focuses on risk-neutral settings where the decision-maker learns to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-24 Zhengqi Wu , Renyuan Xu

There has been growing progress on theoretical analyses for provably efficient learning in MDPs with linear function approximation, but much of the existing work has made strong assumptions to enable exploration by conventional exploration…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-23 Andrea Zanette , Alessandro Lazaric , Mykel J. Kochenderfer , Emma Brunskill

We study offline reinforcement learning in average-reward MDPs, which presents increased challenges from the perspectives of distribution shift and non-uniform coverage, and has been relatively underexamined from a theoretical perspective.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-23 Matthew Zurek , Guy Zamir , Yudong Chen

In this work we provide provable regret guarantees for an online meta-learning control algorithm in an iterative control setting, where in each iteration the system to be controlled is a linear deterministic system that is different and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-07 Deepan Muthirayan , Pramod Khargonekar

Most of reinforcement learning algorithms optimize the discounted criterion which is beneficial to accelerate the convergence and reduce the variance of estimates. Although the discounted criterion is appropriate for certain tasks such as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-02 Xiaoteng Ma , Xiaohang Tang , Li Xia , Jun Yang , Qianchuan Zhao

Model-free reinforcement learning methods such as the Proximal Policy Optimization algorithm (PPO) have successfully applied in complex decision-making problems such as Atari games. However, these methods suffer from high variances and high…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-11-20 Feiyang Pan , Qingpeng Cai , An-Xiang Zeng , Chun-Xiang Pan , Qing Da , Hualin He , Qing He , Pingzhong Tang

We initiate the study of multi-stage episodic reinforcement learning under adversarial corruptions in both the rewards and the transition probabilities of the underlying system extending recent results for the special case of stochastic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-02 Thodoris Lykouris , Max Simchowitz , Aleksandrs Slivkins , Wen Sun

The applicability of reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms in real-world domains often requires adherence to safety constraints, a need difficult to address given the asymptotic nature of the classic RL optimization objective. In contrast…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-15 Moritz A. Zanger , Karam Daaboul , J. Marius Zöllner