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A standard assumption in Reinforcement Learning is that the agent observes every visited state-action pair in the associated Markov Decision Process (MDP), along with the per-step rewards. Strong theoretical results are known in this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Zhengjia Zhuo , Anupam Gupta , Viswanath Nagarajan

This paper studies model-based reinforcement learning (RL) for regret minimization. We focus on finite-horizon episodic RL where the transition model $P$ belongs to a known family of models $\mathcal{P}$, a special case of which is when…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-02 Alex Ayoub , Zeyu Jia , Csaba Szepesvari , Mengdi Wang , Lin F. Yang

Reinforcement learning with multinomial logistic (MNL) function approximation has become an important framework due to its flexibility and broad applicability. While existing studies have established regret guarantees under worst-case…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-28 Wonyoung Kim , Min-Hwan Oh , Garud Iyengar , Assaf Zeevi

Most known regret bounds for reinforcement learning are either episodic or assume an environment without traps. We derive a regret bound without making either assumption, by allowing the algorithm to occasionally delegate an action to an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-07-22 Vanessa Kosoy

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 un-discounted reinforcement learning (RL) in Markov decision processes (MDPs) under drifting non-stationarity, i.e., both the reward and state transition distributions are allowed to evolve over time, as long as their respective…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-26 Wang Chi Cheung , David Simchi-Levi , Ruihao Zhu

We consider the problem of constrained Markov Decision Process (CMDP) where an agent interacts with a unichain Markov Decision Process. At every interaction, the agent obtains a reward. Further, there are $K$ cost functions. The agent aims…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-22 Mridul Agarwal , Qinbo Bai , Vaneet Aggarwal

Any reinforcement learning algorithm that applies to all Markov decision processes (MDPs) will suffer $\Omega(\sqrt{SAT})$ regret on some MDP, where $T$ is the elapsed time and $S$ and $A$ are the cardinalities of the state and action…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2014-11-04 Ian Osband , Benjamin Van Roy

We study the constrained reinforcement learning problem, in which an agent aims to maximize the expected cumulative reward subject to a constraint on the expected total value of a utility function. In contrast to existing model-based…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-10 Arnob Ghosh , Xingyu Zhou , Ness Shroff

A Markov decision process can be parameterized by a transition kernel and a reward function. Both play essential roles in the study of reinforcement learning as evidenced by their presence in the Bellman equations. In our inquiry of various…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-04 Falcon Z. Dai

Modern tasks in reinforcement learning have large state and action spaces. To deal with them efficiently, one often uses predefined feature mapping to represent states and actions in a low-dimensional space. In this paper, we study…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-24 Dongruo Zhou , Jiafan He , Quanquan Gu

We provide an algorithm that achieves the optimal regret rate in an unknown weakly communicating Markov Decision Process (MDP). The algorithm proceeds in episodes where, in each episode, it picks a policy using regularization based on the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-05-14 Peter L. Bartlett , Ambuj Tewari

We consider reinforcement learning (RL) in episodic Markov decision processes (MDPs) with linear function approximation under drifting environment. Specifically, both the reward and state transition functions can evolve over time but their…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-16 Huozhi Zhou , Jinglin Chen , Lav R. Varshney , Ashish Jagmohan

We present a new algorithm based on posterior sampling for learning in Constrained Markov Decision Processes (CMDP) in the infinite-horizon undiscounted setting. The algorithm achieves near-optimal regret bounds while being advantageous…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-30 Danil Provodin , Maurits Kaptein , Mykola Pechenizkiy

We propose novel classical and quantum online algorithms for learning finite-horizon and infinite-horizon average-reward Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). Our algorithms are based on a hybrid exploration-generative reinforcement learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-12 Andris Ambainis , Joao F. Doriguello , Debbie Lim

A crucial problem in reinforcement learning is learning the optimal policy. We study this in tabular infinite-horizon discounted Markov decision processes under the online setting. The existing algorithms either fail to achieve regret…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-13 Xiang Ji , Gen Li

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

Deep reinforcement learning has achieved impressive successes yet often requires a very large amount of interaction data. This result is perhaps unsurprising, as using complicated function approximation often requires more data to fit, and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-20 Jonathan N. Lee , Aldo Pacchiano , Vidya Muthukumar , Weihao Kong , Emma Brunskill

We study regret minimization for infinite-horizon average-reward Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) under cost constraints. We start by designing a policy optimization algorithm with carefully designed action-value estimator and bonus term,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-02 Liyu Chen , Rahul Jain , Haipeng Luo

State-of-the-art efficient model-based Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms typically act by iteratively solving empirical models, i.e., by performing \emph{full-planning} on Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) built by the gathered…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-01 Yonathan Efroni , Nadav Merlis , Mohammad Ghavamzadeh , Shie Mannor