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Related papers: Combining No-regret and Q-learning

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Motivated by real-world settings where data collection and policy deployment -- whether for a single agent or across multiple agents -- are costly, we study the problem of on-policy single-agent reinforcement learning (RL) and federated RL…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-11 Haochen Zhang , Zhong Zheng , Lingzhou Xue

A celebrated connection in the interface of online learning and game theory establishes that players minimizing swap regret converge to correlated equilibria (CE) -- a seminal game-theoretic solution concept. Despite the long history of…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-11-05 Ioannis Anagnostides , Alkis Kalavasis , Tuomas Sandholm

We show that Optimistic Hedge -- a common variant of multiplicative-weights-updates with recency bias -- attains ${\rm poly}(\log T)$ regret in multi-player general-sum games. In particular, when every player of the game uses Optimistic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-26 Constantinos Daskalakis , Maxwell Fishelson , Noah Golowich

Monte Carlo Counterfactual Regret Minimization (MCCFR) has emerged as a cornerstone algorithm for solving extensive-form games, but its integration with deep neural networks introduces scale-dependent challenges that manifest differently…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-29 Zakaria El Jaafari

Model-free reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms, such as Q-learning, directly parameterize and update value functions or policies without explicitly modeling the environment. They are typically simpler, more flexible to use, and thus more…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-07-11 Chi Jin , Zeyuan Allen-Zhu , Sebastien Bubeck , Michael I. Jordan

We consider an agent interacting with an environment in a single stream of actions, observations, and rewards, with no reset. This process is not assumed to be a Markov Decision Process (MDP). Rather, the agent has several representations…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2013-03-19 Odalric-Ambrym Maillard , Phuong Nguyen , Ronald Ortner , Daniil Ryabko

Model-free Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms such as Q-learning [Watkins, Dayan 92] have been widely used in practice and can achieve human level performance in applications such as video games [Mnih et al. 15]. Recently, equipped with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-03 Zhao Song , Wen Sun

Learning from repeated play in a fixed two-player zero-sum game is a classic problem in game theory and online learning. We consider a variant of this problem where the game payoff matrix changes over time, possibly in an adversarial…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-01 Mengxiao Zhang , Peng Zhao , Haipeng Luo , Zhi-Hua Zhou

Recent literature has made much progress in understanding \emph{online LQR}: a modern learning-theoretic take on the classical control problem in which a learner attempts to optimally control an unknown linear dynamical system with fully…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-06 Max Simchowitz

In the convex optimization approach to online regret minimization, many methods have been developed to guarantee a $O(\sqrt{T})$ bound on regret for subdifferentiable convex loss functions with bounded subgradients, by using a reduction to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-09-20 Arthur Flajolet , Patrick Jaillet

No-regret learning dynamics ensure that a learner asymptotically achieves an average reward no worse than that of any fixed strategy. This no-regret guarantee does not determine the value of the asymptotic average reward. Indeed, it is…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-03-04 Hassan Abdelraouf , Jeff S. Shamma

We study algorithms for online linear optimization in Hilbert spaces, focusing on the case where the player is unconstrained. We develop a novel characterization of a large class of minimax algorithms, recovering, and even improving,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2014-05-22 H. Brendan McMahan , Francesco Orabona

Nash equilibrium is perhaps the best-known solution concept in game theory. Such a solution assigns a strategy to each player which offers no incentive to unilaterally deviate. While a Nash equilibrium is guaranteed to always exist, the…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-04-29 David Sychrovský , Christopher Solinas , Revan MacQueen , Kevin Wang , James R. Wright , Nathan R. Sturtevant , Michael Bowling

We study model-free reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms in episodic non-stationary constrained Markov Decision Processes (CMDPs), in which an agent aims to maximize the expected cumulative reward subject to a cumulative constraint on the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-13 Honghao Wei , Arnob Ghosh , Ness Shroff , Lei Ying , Xingyu Zhou

Learning Markov decision processes (MDPs) in the presence of the adversary is a challenging problem in reinforcement learning (RL). In this paper, we study RL in episodic MDPs with adversarial reward and full information feedback, where the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-21 Jiafan He , Dongruo Zhou , Quanquan Gu

This paper studies the optimistic variant of Fictitious Play for learning in two-player zero-sum games. While it is known that Optimistic FTRL -- a regularized algorithm with a bounded stepsize parameter -- obtains constant regret in this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-15 John Lazarsfeld , Georgios Piliouras , Ryann Sim , Stratis Skoulakis

The existence of simple, uncoupled no-regret dynamics that converge to correlated equilibria in normal-form games is a celebrated result in the theory of multi-agent systems. Specifically, it has been known for more than 20 years that when…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2022-09-05 Andrea Celli , Alberto Marchesi , Gabriele Farina , Nicola Gatti

This paper considers the stability of online learning algorithms and its implications for learnability (bounded regret). We introduce a novel quantity called {\em forward regret} that intuitively measures how good an online learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-11-28 Ankan Saha , Prateek Jain , Ambuj Tewari

This paper addresses policy learning in non-stationary environments and games with continuous actions. Rather than the classical reward maximization mechanism, inspired by the ideas of follow-the-regularized-leader (FTRL) and mirror descent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-22 Rong-Jun Qin , Fan-Ming Luo , Hong Qian , Yang Yu

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a classical tool to solve network control or policy optimization problems in unknown environments. The original Q-learning suffers from performance and complexity challenges across very large networks. Herein,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-02 Talha Bozkus , Urbashi Mitra