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Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) has witnessed a remarkable surge in interest, fueled by the empirical success achieved in applications of single-agent reinforcement learning (RL). In this study, we consider a distributed…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-07-30 Han-Dong Lim , Donghwan Lee

In this paper, we derive rates of convergence in the high-dimensional central limit theorem for Polyak-Ruppert averaged iterates generated by the asynchronous Q-learning algorithm with a polynomial stepsize $k^{-\omega},\, \omega \in (1/2,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-04-09 Artemy Rubtsov , Sergey Samsonov , Vladimir Ulyanov , Alexey Naumov

For many tasks of data analysis, we may only have the information of the explanatory variable and the evaluation of the response values are quite expensive. While it is impractical or too costly to obtain the responses of all units, a…

Computation · Statistics 2023-04-07 Wei Zheng , Ting Tian , Xueqin Wang

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

Markov chain methods are remarkably successful in computational physics, machine learning, and combinatorial optimization. The cost of such methods often reduces to the mixing time, i.e., the time required to reach the steady state of the…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2018-11-15 Davide Orsucci , Hans J. Briegel , Vedran Dunjko

Precision medicine aims to tailor therapeutic decisions to individual patient characteristics. This objective is commonly formalized through dynamic treatment regimes, which use statistical and machine learning methods to derive sequential…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-23 Sophia Yazzourh , Erica E. M. Moodie

Achieving sample efficiency in online episodic reinforcement learning (RL) requires optimally balancing exploration and exploitation. When it comes to a finite-horizon episodic Markov decision process with $S$ states, $A$ actions and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-18 Gen Li , Laixi Shi , Yuxin Chen , Yuejie Chi

This paper considers a class of reinforcement learning problems, which involve systems with two types of states: stochastic and pseudo-stochastic. In such systems, stochastic states follow a stochastic transition kernel while the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-09 Honghao Wei , Xin Liu , Weina Wang , Lei Ying

Q-learning is one of the most popular methods in Reinforcement Learning (RL). Transfer Learning aims to utilize the learned knowledge from source tasks to help new tasks to improve the sample complexity of the new tasks. Considering that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-09-25 Yue Wang , Qi Meng , Wei Cheng , Yuting Liug , Zhi-Ming Ma , Tie-Yan Liu

We study model-free Q-learning in finite-horizon episodic Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) with stationary dynamics across episodes. We identify a central issue in nascent model-free posterior-sampling works: the reliance on delayed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Sofia R. Miskala-Dinc , Aviva Prins

We study the problem of efficient exploration in order to learn an accurate model of an environment, modeled as a Markov decision process (MDP). Efficient exploration in this problem requires the agent to identify the regions in which…

Markov decision processes (MDPs) and simple stochastic games (SSGs) provide a rich mathematical framework to study many important problems related to probabilistic systems. MDPs and SSGs with finite-horizon objectives, where the goal is to…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2012-09-18 Krishnendu Chatterjee , Rasmus Ibsen-Jensen

In traditional models of supervised learning, the goal of a learner -- given examples from an arbitrary joint distribution on $\mathbb{R}^d \times \{\pm 1\}$ -- is to output a hypothesis that is competitive (to within $\epsilon$) of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-02 Gautam Chandrasekaran , Adam Klivans , Vasilis Kontonis , Raghu Meka , Konstantinos Stavropoulos

Stochastic Approximation (SA) is a widely used algorithmic approach in various fields, including optimization and reinforcement learning (RL). Among RL algorithms, Q-learning is particularly popular due to its empirical success. In this…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-01-26 Yixuan Zhang , Qiaomin Xie

This paper studies the continuous-time q-learning (the continuous time counterpart of Q-learing) for Markov switching system under Tsallis entropy regularization. We address the difficulty in traditional RL algorithms where the Tsallis…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-01-28 Minghui Zhang , Xun Li , Xin Zhang

Multi-period mean-variance optimization is a long-standing problem, caused by the failure of dynamic programming principle. This paper studies the mean-variance optimization in a setting of finite-horizon discrete-time Markov decision…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-07-31 Li Xia , Zhihui Yu

We study the design of sample-efficient algorithms for reinforcement learning in the presence of rich, high-dimensional observations, formalized via the Block MDP problem. Existing algorithms suffer from either 1) computational…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-13 Zakaria Mhammedi , Dylan J. Foster , Alexander Rakhlin

We study the problem of PAC learning $\gamma$-margin halfspaces with Random Classification Noise. We establish an information-computation tradeoff suggesting an inherent gap between the sample complexity of the problem and the sample…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-29 Ilias Diakonikolas , Jelena Diakonikolas , Daniel M. Kane , Puqian Wang , Nikos Zarifis

In this paper, for POMDPs, we provide the convergence of a Q learning algorithm for control policies using a finite history of past observations and control actions, and, consequentially, we establish near optimality of such limit Q…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-27 Ali Devran Kara , Serdar Yuksel

Online reinforcement learning in non-episodic, finite-horizon MDPs remains underexplored and is challenged by the need to estimate returns to a fixed terminal time. Existing infinite-horizon methods, which often rely on discounted…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Jiamin Xu , Kyra Gan