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Safe reinforcement learning has been a promising approach for optimizing the policy of an agent that operates in safety-critical applications. In this paper, we propose an algorithm, SNO-MDP, that explores and optimizes Markov decision…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-18 Akifumi Wachi , Yanan Sui

The main challenge of multiagent reinforcement learning is the difficulty of learning useful policies in the presence of other simultaneously learning agents whose changing behaviors jointly affect the environment's transition and reward…

We propose a reinforcement learning (RL) framework for multi-objective decision-making, where the agent seeks to optimize a vector of rewards rather than a single scalar value. The objective is to ensure that the time-averaged reward vector…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-11-18 Rahul Misra , Manuela L. Bujorianu , Rafał Wisniewski

We extend the options framework for temporal abstraction in reinforcement learning from discounted Markov decision processes (MDPs) to average-reward MDPs. Our contributions include general convergent off-policy inter-option learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-27 Yi Wan , Abhishek Naik , Richard S. Sutton

We consider online reinforcement learning in episodic Markov decision process (MDP) with unknown transition function and stochastic rewards drawn from some fixed but unknown distribution. The learner aims to learn the optimal policy and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-12 Vincent Leon , S. Rasoul Etesami

Reinforcement learning considers the problem of finding policies that maximize an expected cumulative reward in a Markov decision process with unknown transition probabilities. In this paper we consider the problem of finding optimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-19 Santiago Paternain , Juan Andres Bazerque , Alejandro Ribeiro

Reinforcement learning is commonly concerned with problems of maximizing accumulated rewards in Markov decision processes. Oftentimes, a certain goal state or a subset of the state space attain maximal reward. In such a case, the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-08-23 Pavel Osinenko , Grigory Yaremenko , Georgiy Malaniya , Anton Bolychev , Alexander Gepperth

A crucial problem in reinforcement learning is learning the optimal policy. We study this in tabular infinite-horizon discounted Markov decision processes under the online setting. The existing algorithms either fail to achieve regret…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-13 Xiang Ji , Gen Li

We consider reinforcement learning in changing Markov Decision Processes where both the state-transition probabilities and the reward functions may vary over time. For this problem setting, we propose an algorithm using a sliding window…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-05-28 Pratik Gajane , Ronald Ortner , Peter Auer

The beneficial effects of treatments vary across individuals in most studies. Treatment heterogeneity motivates practitioners to search for the optimal policy based on personal characteristics. A long-standing common practice in policy…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-01-06 Xuqiao Li , Ying Yan

Model-free reinforcement learning is known to be memory and computation efficient and more amendable to large scale problems. In this paper, two model-free algorithms are introduced for learning infinite-horizon average-reward Markov…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-26 Chen-Yu Wei , Mehdi Jafarnia-Jahromi , Haipeng Luo , Hiteshi Sharma , Rahul Jain

We consider the problem of computing optimal policies in average-reward Markov decision processes. This classical problem can be formulated as a linear program directly amenable to saddle-point optimization methods, albeit with a number of…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-01-13 Joan Bas-Serrano , Gergely Neu

Data acquisition efficiency is a central challenge in deploying reinforcement learning in business and healthcare operations, where interactions are costly, slow, and often involve humans in the loop. This paper develops a unified large…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Mingjie Hu , Jian-Qiang Hu , Enlu Zhou

We consider infinite-horizon stationary $\gamma$-discounted Markov Decision Processes, for which it is known that there exists a stationary optimal policy. Using Value and Policy Iteration with some error $\epsilon$ at each iteration, it is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-11-30 Bruno Scherrer , Boris Lesner

Sequential decision making using Markov Decision Process underpins many realworld applications. Both model-based and model free methods have achieved strong results in these settings. However, real-world tasks must balance reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-01 Janaka Chathuranga Brahmanage , Akshat Kumar

With the increasing pace of automation, modern robotic systems need to act in stochastic, non-stationary, partially observable environments. A range of algorithms for finding parameterized policies that optimize for long-term average…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-09-04 David Nass , Boris Belousov , Jan Peters

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

We propose an epoch-based reinforcement learning algorithm for infinite-horizon average-cost Markov decision processes (MDPs) that leverages a partial order over a policy class. In this structure, $\pi' \leq \pi$ if data collected under…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-08-07 Zhongjun Zhang , Shipra Agrawal , Ilan Lobel , Sean R. Sinclair , Christina Lee Yu

Recent advances in recommender systems have shown that user-system interaction essentially formulates long-term optimization problems, and online reinforcement learning can be adopted to improve recommendation performance. The general…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2025-02-04 Xiaobei Wang , Shuchang Liu , Qingpeng Cai , Xiang Li , Lantao Hu , Han li , Guangming Xie

We propose a general framework for entropy-regularized average-reward reinforcement learning in Markov decision processes (MDPs). Our approach is based on extending the linear-programming formulation of policy optimization in MDPs to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-05-23 Gergely Neu , Anders Jonsson , Vicenç Gómez