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We develop several provably efficient model-free reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms for infinite-horizon average-reward Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). We consider both online setting and the setting with access to a simulator. In the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-29 Zihan Zhang , Qiaomin Xie

We propose a new regret minimization algorithm for episodic sparse linear Markov decision process (SMDP) where the state-transition distribution is a linear function of observed features. The only previously known algorithm for SMDP…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-10-25 Wonyoung Kim , Garud Iyengar , Assaf Zeevi

In this work, we consider the regret minimization problem for reinforcement learning in latent Markov Decision Processes (LMDP). In an LMDP, an MDP is randomly drawn from a set of $M$ possible MDPs at the beginning of the interaction, but…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-10 Jeongyeol Kwon , Yonathan Efroni , Constantine Caramanis , Shie Mannor

The curse of dimensionality renders Reinforcement Learning (RL) impractical in many real-world settings with exponentially large state and action spaces. Yet, many environments exhibit exploitable structure that can accelerate learning. To…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-16 Thomas van Vuren , Fiona Sloothaak , Maarten G. Wolf , Jaron Sanders

We study a new class of MDPs that employs multinomial logit (MNL) function approximation to ensure valid probability distributions over the state space. Despite its significant benefits, incorporating the non-linear function raises…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-17 Long-Fei Li , Yu-Jie Zhang , Peng Zhao , Zhi-Hua Zhou

We consider the infinite-horizon linear Markov Decision Processes (MDPs), where the transition probabilities of the dynamic model can be linearly parameterized with the help of a predefined low-dimensional feature mapping. While the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-19 Yu-Heng Hung , Ping-Chun Hsieh , Akshay Mete , P. R. Kumar

Recent studies have shown that episodic reinforcement learning (RL) is not more difficult than contextual bandits, even with a long planning horizon and unknown state transitions. However, these results are limited to either tabular Markov…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-24 Dongruo Zhou , Quanquan Gu

Markov decision processes (MDPs) are widely used in modeling decision making problems in stochastic environments. However, precise specification of the reward functions in MDPs is often very difficult. Recent approaches have focused on…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2012-02-20 Eunsoo Oh , Kee-Eung Kim

The curse of dimensionality is a widely known issue in reinforcement learning (RL). In the tabular setting where the state space $\mathcal{S}$ and the action space $\mathcal{A}$ are both finite, to obtain a nearly optimal policy with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-28 Bingyan Wang , Yuling Yan , Jianqing Fan

We develop several new algorithms for learning Markov Decision Processes in an infinite-horizon average-reward setting with linear function approximation. Using the optimism principle and assuming that the MDP has a linear structure, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-27 Chen-Yu Wei , Mehdi Jafarnia-Jahromi , Haipeng Luo , Rahul Jain

We study lifelong reinforcement learning (RL) in a regret minimization setting of linear contextual Markov decision process (MDP), where the agent needs to learn a multi-task policy while solving a streaming sequence of tasks. We propose an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-02 Sanae Amani , Lin F. Yang , Ching-An Cheng

To overcome the curses of dimensionality and modeling of Dynamic Programming (DP) methods to solve Markov Decision Process (MDP) problems, Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods are adopted in practice. Contrary to traditional RL algorithms…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-08-24 Arghyadip Roy , Vivek Borkar , Abhay Karandikar , Prasanna Chaporkar

Markov decision processes (MDPs) are a well studied framework for solving sequential decision making problems under uncertainty. Exact methods for solving MDPs based on dynamic programming such as policy iteration and value iteration are…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2015-09-09 Yanping Huang

Reinforcement learning typically assumes that agents observe feedback for their actions immediately, but in many real-world applications (like recommendation systems) feedback is observed in delay. This paper studies online learning in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-16 Tal Lancewicki , Aviv Rosenberg , Yishay Mansour

We introduce a new framework of episodic tabular Markov decision processes (MDPs) with adversarial preferences, which we refer to as preference-based MDPs (PbMDPs). Unlike standard episodic MDPs with adversarial losses, where the numerical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-17 Taira Tsuchiya , Shinji Ito , Haipeng Luo

In this paper, we study the episodic reinforcement learning (RL) problem modeled by finite-horizon Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) with constraint on the number of batches. The multi-batch reinforcement learning framework, where the agent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-18 Zihan Zhang , Yuhang Jiang , Yuan Zhou , Xiangyang Ji

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

Despite rapid progress in theoretical reinforcement learning (RL) over the last few years, most of the known guarantees are worst-case in nature, failing to take advantage of structure that may be known a priori about a given RL problem at…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-26 Noah Golowich , Ankur Moitra

We study regret minimization for reinforcement learning (RL) in Latent Markov Decision Processes (LMDPs) with context in hindsight. We design a novel model-based algorithmic framework which can be instantiated with both a model-optimistic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-23 Runlong Zhou , Ruosong Wang , Simon S. Du

We investigate the hardness of online reinforcement learning in fixed horizon, sparse linear Markov decision process (MDP), with a special focus on the high-dimensional regime where the ambient dimension is larger than the number of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-11 Botao Hao , Tor Lattimore , Csaba Szepesvári , Mengdi Wang