English
Related papers

Related papers: Learning and Planning in Average-Reward Markov Dec…

200 papers

Finding optimal policies which maximize long term rewards of Markov Decision Processes requires the use of dynamic programming and backward induction to solve the Bellman optimality equation. However, many real-world problems require…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-10 Mridul Agarwal , Vaneet Aggarwal

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

Many policy-based reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms can be viewed as instantiations of approximate policy iteration (PI), i.e., where policy improvement and policy evaluation are both performed approximately. In applications where the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-29 Yashaswini Murthy , Mehrdad Moharrami , R. Srikant

A tenet of reinforcement learning is that the agent always observes rewards. However, this is not true in many realistic settings, e.g., a human observer may not always be available to provide rewards, sensors may be limited or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Alireza Kazemipour , Simone Parisi , Matthew E. Taylor , Michael Bowling

While learning in an unknown Markov Decision Process (MDP), an agent should trade off exploration to discover new information about the MDP, and exploitation of the current knowledge to maximize the reward. Although the agent will…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-16 Evrard Garcelon , Mohammad Ghavamzadeh , Alessandro Lazaric , Matteo Pirotta

Much of reinforcement learning theory is built on top of oracles that are computationally hard to implement. Specifically for learning near-optimal policies in Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs), existing algorithms…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-08 Noah Golowich , Ankur Moitra , Dhruv Rohatgi

We study the model-based undiscounted reinforcement learning for partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs). The oracle we consider is the optimal policy of the POMDP with a known environment in terms of the average reward over…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-19 Yi Xiong , Ningyuan Chen , Xuefeng Gao , Xiang Zhou

We consider episodic reinforcement learning in reward-mixing Markov decision processes (RMMDPs): at the beginning of every episode nature randomly picks a latent reward model among $M$ candidates and an agent interacts with the MDP…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-07 Jeongyeol Kwon , Yonathan Efroni , Constantine Caramanis , Shie Mannor

Standard Markov decision process (MDP) and reinforcement learning algorithms optimize the policy with respect to the expected gain. We propose an algorithm which enables to optimize an alternative objective: the probability that the gain is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-06 Vincent Corlay , Jean-Christophe Sibel

To accumulate knowledge and improve its policy of behaviour, a reinforcement learning agent can learn `off-policy' about policies that differ from the policy used to generate its experience. This is important to learn counterfactuals, or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-03 Simon Schmitt , John Shawe-Taylor , Hado van Hasselt

In many real-world decision problems there is partially observed, hidden or latent information that remains fixed throughout an interaction. Such decision problems can be modeled as Latent Markov Decision Processes (LMDPs), where a latent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-27 Jeongyeol Kwon , Shie Mannor , Constantine Caramanis , Yonathan Efroni

We formalize the problem of maximizing the mean-payoff value with high probability while satisfying a parity objective in a Markov decision process (MDP) with unknown probabilistic transition function and unknown reward function. Assuming…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-08-24 Jan Křetínský , Guillermo A. Pérez , Jean-François Raskin

In this paper, we consider reinforcement learning of Markov Decision Processes (MDP) with peak constraints, where an agent chooses a policy to optimize an objective and at the same time satisfy additional constraints. The agent has to take…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-12-09 Ather Gattami

We study online learning in episodic constrained Markov decision processes (CMDPs), where the learner aims at collecting as much reward as possible over the episodes, while satisfying some long-term constraints during the learning process.…

We study episodic reinforcement learning in non-stationary linear (a.k.a. low-rank) Markov Decision Processes (MDPs), i.e, both the reward and transition kernel are linear with respect to a given feature map and are allowed to evolve either…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-28 Ahmed Touati , Pascal Vincent

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

We study the offline data-driven sequential decision making problem in the framework of Markov decision process (MDP). In order to enhance the generalizability and adaptivity of the learned policy, we propose to evaluate each policy by a…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2021-11-11 Zhengling Qi , Peng Liao

We consider off-policy evaluation of dynamic treatment rules under sequential ignorability, given an assumption that the underlying system can be modeled as a partially observed Markov decision process (POMDP). We propose an estimator,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-10 Yuchen Hu , Stefan Wager

Action delays degrade the performance of reinforcement learning in many real-world systems. This paper proposes a formal definition of delay-aware Markov Decision Process and proves it can be transformed into standard MDP with augmented…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-10 Baiming Chen , Mengdi Xu , Liang Li , Ding Zhao

We study non-rectangular robust Markov decision processes under the average-reward criterion, where the ambiguity set couples transition probabilities across states and the adversary commits to a stationary kernel for the entire horizon. We…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-03-11 Shengbo Wang , Nian Si