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Reinforcement learning has traditionally been studied with exponential discounting or the average reward setup, mainly due to their mathematical tractability. However, such frameworks fall short of accurately capturing human behavior, which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-18 S. R. Eshwar , Mayank Motwani , Nibedita Roy , Gugan Thoppe

In traditional statistical learning, data points are usually assumed to be independently and identically distributed (i.i.d.) following an unknown probability distribution. This paper presents a contrasting viewpoint, perceiving data points…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-19 Yangchen Pan , Junfeng Wen , Chenjun Xiao , Philip Torr

We tackle average-reward infinite-horizon POMDPs with an unknown transition model but a known observation model, a setting that has been previously addressed in two limiting ways: (i) frequentist methods relying on suboptimal stochastic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-09 Alessio Russo , Alberto Maria Metelli , Marcello Restelli

Off-policy reinforcement learning algorithms promise to be applicable in settings where only a fixed data-set (batch) of environment interactions is available and no new experience can be acquired. This property makes these algorithms…

We present an optimistic Q-learning algorithm for regret minimization in average reward reinforcement learning under an additional assumption on the underlying MDP that for all policies, the time to visit some frequent state $s_0$ is finite…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-17 Priyank Agrawal , Shipra Agrawal

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

In this paper we present an algorithm to compute risk averse policies in Markov Decision Processes (MDP) when the total cost criterion is used together with the average value at risk (AVaR) metric. Risk averse policies are needed when large…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2016-02-17 Stefano Carpin , Yin-Lam Chow , Marco Pavone

We consider a constrained Markov Decision Problem (CMDP) where the goal of an agent is to maximize the expected discounted sum of rewards over an infinite horizon while ensuring that the expected discounted sum of costs exceeds a certain…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-01 Washim Uddin Mondal , Vaneet Aggarwal

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

We study reinforcement learning (RL) for decision processes with non-Markovian reward, in which high-level knowledge of the task in the form of reward machines is available to the learner. We consider probabilistic reward machines with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-30 Hippolyte Bourel , Anders Jonsson , Odalric-Ambrym Maillard , Chenxiao Ma , Mohammad Sadegh Talebi

We provide improved gap-dependent regret bounds for reinforcement learning in finite episodic Markov decision processes. Compared to prior work, our bounds depend on alternative definitions of gaps. These definitions are based on the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-27 Christoph Dann , Teodor V. Marinov , Mehryar Mohri , Julian Zimmert

Reward-free reinforcement learning (RL) considers the setting where the agent does not have access to a reward function during exploration, but must propose a near-optimal policy for an arbitrary reward function revealed only after…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-22 Andrew Wagenmaker , Yifang Chen , Max Simchowitz , Simon S. Du , Kevin Jamieson

We consider a new form of reinforcement learning (RL) that is based on opportunities to directly learn the optimal control policy and a general Markov decision process (MDP) framework devised to support these opportunities. Derivations of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-02 Yingdong Lu , Mark S. Squillante , Chai Wah Wu

We propose a novel hierarchical reinforcement learning framework for control with continuous state and action spaces. In our framework, the user specifies subgoal regions which are subsets of states; then, we (i) learn options that serve as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-26 Kishor Jothimurugan , Osbert Bastani , Rajeev Alur

A key task in Artificial Intelligence is learning effective policies for controlling agents in unknown environments to optimize performance measures. Off-policy learning methods, like Q-learning, allow learners to make optimal decisions…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-09-10 Mingxuan Li , Junzhe Zhang , Elias Bareinboim

We study online learning in constrained Markov decision processes (CMDPs) with adversarial losses and stochastic hard constraints, under bandit feedback. We consider three scenarios. In the first one, we address general CMDPs, where we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-10 Francesco Emanuele Stradi , Matteo Castiglioni , Alberto Marchesi , Nicola Gatti

We present a novel theoretical framework, Q-MMR, for off-policy evaluation in finite-horizon MDPs. Q-MMR learns a set of scalar weights, one for each data point, such that the reweighted rewards approximate the expected return under the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Xiang Li , Nan Jiang

We study reinforcement learning in infinite-horizon average-reward settings with linear MDPs. Previous work addresses this problem by approximating the average-reward setting by discounted setting and employing a value iteration-based…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-17 Kihyuk Hong , Ambuj Tewari

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 investigate an infinite-horizon average reward Markov Decision Process (MDP) with delayed, composite, and partially anonymous reward feedback. The delay and compositeness of rewards mean that rewards generated as a result of taking an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-29 Washim Uddin Mondal , Vaneet Aggarwal