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Reinforcement learning studies how an agent should interact with an environment to maximize its cumulative reward. A standard way to study this question abstractly is to ask how many samples an agent needs from the environment to learn an…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2021-12-21 Daochen Wang , Aarthi Sundaram , Robin Kothari , Ashish Kapoor , Martin Roetteler

We study the problem of zero-delay coding for the transmission of a Markov source over a noisy channel with feedback and present a reinforcement learning solution which is guaranteed to achieve near-optimality. To this end, we formulate the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-10-07 Liam Cregg , Fady Alajaji , Serdar Yuksel

In data-driven decision-making in marketing, healthcare, and education, it is desirable to utilize a large amount of data from existing ventures to navigate high-dimensional feature spaces and address data scarcity in new ventures. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-13 Elynn Chen , Xi Chen , Wenbo Jing

The objective in this paper is to obtain fast converging reinforcement learning algorithms to approximate solutions to the problem of discounted cost optimal stopping in an irreducible, uniformly ergodic Markov chain, evolving on a compact…

Systems and Control · Computer Science 2019-10-01 Shuhang Chen , Adithya M. Devraj , Ana Bušić , Sean P. Meyn

We prove new upper and lower bounds for sample complexity of finding an $\epsilon$-optimal policy of an infinite-horizon average-reward Markov decision process (MDP) given access to a generative model. When the mixing time of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-15 Yujia Jin , Aaron Sidford

Existing studies indicate that momentum ideas in conventional optimization can be used to improve the performance of Q-learning algorithms. However, the finite-sample analysis for momentum-based Q-learning algorithms is only available for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-31 Bowen Weng , Huaqing Xiong , Lin Zhao , Yingbin Liang , Wei Zhang

We study reinforcement learning in infinite-horizon discounted Markov decision processes with continuous state spaces, where data are generated online from a single trajectory under a Markovian behavior policy. To avoid maintaining an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-05 Shengbo Wang

In this work, we design quantum algorithms that are more efficient than classical algorithms to solve time-dependent and finite-horizon Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) in two distinct settings: (1) In the exact dynamics setting, where the…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2025-08-11 Bin Luo , Yuwen Huang , Jonathan Allcock , Xiaojun Lin , Shengyu Zhang , John C. S. Lui

Q-learning is a popular reinforcement learning algorithm. This algorithm has however been studied and analysed mainly in the infinite horizon setting. There are several important applications which can be modeled in the framework of finite…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-09 Vivek VP , Dr. Shalabh Bhatnagar

We investigate the problem of best-policy identification in discounted Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) when the learner has access to a generative model. The objective is to devise a learning algorithm returning the best policy as early as…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-05-11 Aymen Al Marjani , Alexandre Proutiere

Reinforcement learning has witnessed significant advancements, particularly with the emergence of model-based approaches. Among these, $Q$-learning has proven to be a powerful algorithm in model-free settings. However, the extension of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Han-Dong Lim , HyeAnn Lee , Donghwan Lee

We study computational and statistical aspects of learning Latent Markov Decision Processes (LMDPs). In this model, the learner interacts with an MDP drawn at the beginning of each epoch from an unknown mixture of MDPs. To sidestep known…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-13 Fan Chen , Constantinos Daskalakis , Noah Golowich , Alexander Rakhlin

We study the sample complexity of the plug-in approach for learning $\varepsilon$-optimal policies in average-reward Markov decision processes (MDPs) with a generative model. The plug-in approach constructs a model estimate then computes an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-12 Matthew Zurek , Yudong Chen

In this work, we present the first finite-time analysis of Q-learning with time-varying learning policies (i.e., on-policy sampling) for discounted Markov decision processes under minimal assumptions, requiring only the existence of a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-07 Phalguni Nanda , Zaiwei Chen

We consider the problem of learning an $\varepsilon$-optimal policy in a general class of continuous-space Markov decision processes (MDPs) having smooth Bellman operators. Given access to a generative model, we achieve rate-optimal sample…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-13 Davide Maran , Alberto Maria Metelli , Matteo Papini , Marcello Restelli

The objective is to study an on-line Hidden Markov model (HMM) estimation-based Q-learning algorithm for partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP) on finite state and action sets. When the full state observation is available,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-09-25 Hyung-Jin Yoon , Donghwan Lee , Naira Hovakimyan

The problem of sample complexity of online reinforcement learning is often studied in the literature without taking into account any partial knowledge about the system dynamics that could potentially accelerate the learning process. In this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-04 Meshal Alharbi , Mardavij Roozbehani , Munther Dahleh

Popular Maximum Entropy Inverse Reinforcement Learning approaches require the computation of expected state visitation frequencies for the optimal policy under an estimate of the reward function. This usually requires intermediate value…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-05 Gabriel Kalweit , Maria Huegle , Moritz Werling , Joschka Boedecker

We present a non-asymptotic convergence analysis of $Q$-learning and actor-critic algorithms for robust average-reward Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) under contamination, total-variation (TV) distance, and Wasserstein uncertainty sets. A…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-11 Yang Xu , Swetha Ganesh , Vaneet Aggarwal

Time-inhomogeneous finite-horizon Markov decision processes (MDP) are frequently employed to model decision-making in dynamic treatment regimes and other statistical reinforcement learning (RL) scenarios. These fields, especially healthcare…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Elynn Chen , Sai Li , Michael I. Jordan