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Constrained decision-making is essential for designing safe policies in real-world control systems, yet simulated environments often fail to capture real-world adversities. We consider the problem of learning a policy that will maximize the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Sourav Ganguly , Kishan Panaganti , Arnob Ghosh , Adam Wierman

Modern policy optimization methods in reinforcement learning, such as TRPO and PPO, owe their success to the use of parameterized policies. However, while theoretical guarantees have been established for this class of algorithms, especially…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-02-14 Carlo Alfano , Rui Yuan , Patrick Rebeschini

We propose a new approach to the problem of searching a space of policies for a Markov decision process (MDP) or a partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP), given a model. Our approach is based on the following observation: Any…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2013-01-18 Andrew Y. Ng , Michael I. Jordan

We investigate the problem of best policy identification in discounted linear Markov Decision Processes in the fixed confidence setting under a generative model. We first derive an instance-specific lower bound on the expected number of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-12 Jerome Taupin , Yassir Jedra , Alexandre Proutiere

It is common to address the curse of dimensionality in Markov decision processes (MDPs) by exploiting low-rank representations. This motivates much of the recent theoretical study on linear MDPs. However, most approaches require a given…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-09 Tianjun Zhang , Tongzheng Ren , Mengjiao Yang , Joseph E. Gonzalez , Dale Schuurmans , Bo Dai

We study safe reinforcement learning in finite-horizon linear mixture constrained Markov decision processes (CMDPs) with adversarial rewards under full-information feedback and an unknown transition kernel. We propose a primal-dual policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Kihyun Yu , Seoungbin Bae , Dabeen Lee

This paper introduces and examines numerical approximation schemes for computing risk budgeting portfolios associated to positive homogeneous and sub-additive risk measures. We employ Mirror Descent algorithms to determine the optimal risk…

Portfolio Management · Quantitative Finance 2024-11-20 Martin Arnaiz Iglesias , Adil Rengim Cetingoz , Noufel Frikha

This paper investigates group distributionally robust optimization (GDRO) with the goal of learning a model that performs well over $m$ different distributions. First, we formulate GDRO as a stochastic convex-concave saddle-point problem,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-21 Lijun Zhang , Haomin Bai , Peng Zhao , Tianbao Yang , Zhi-Hua Zhou

We propose an algorithm for deterministic continuous Markov Decision Processes with sparse rewards that computes the optimal policy exactly with no dependency on the size of the state space. The algorithm has time complexity of $O( |R|^3…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-05-21 Joshua R. Bertram , Peng Wei

Existing work on linear constrained Markov decision processes (CMDPs) has primarily focused on stochastic settings, where the losses and costs are either fixed or drawn from fixed distributions. However, such formulations are inherently…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Kihyun Yu , Seoungbin Bae , Dabeen Lee

We study the minimization of a spectral risk measure of the total discounted cost generated by a Markov Decision Process (MDP) over a finite or infinite planning horizon. The MDP is assumed to have Borel state and action spaces and the cost…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-10-16 Nicole Bäuerle , Alexander Glauner

This paper establishes the convergence properties of the Popov mirror-prox algorithm for solving stochastic and deterministic variational inequalities (VIs) under a polynomial growth condition on the mapping variation. Unlike existing…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-10-21 Abhishek Chakraborty , Angelia Nedić

We study an explicit mirror-descent method for finite-horizon deterministic optimal control problems. The method is motivated by Pontryagin's maximum principle: at each iteration, one solves the state and adjoint equations and updates the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-05-05 Ye Feng , Jianfeng Lu

We present a novel accelerated primal-dual (APD) method for solving a class of deterministic and stochastic saddle point problems (SPP). The basic idea of this algorithm is to incorporate a multi-step acceleration scheme into the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2013-09-24 Yunmei Chen , Guanghui Lan , Yuyuan Ouyang

Constrained Markov Decision Process (CMDP) is a natural framework for reinforcement learning tasks with safety constraints, where agents learn a policy that maximizes the long-term reward while satisfying the constraints on the long-term…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-02-20 Qingkai Liang , Fanyu Que , Eytan Modiano

We propose and study a general framework for regularized Markov decision processes (MDPs) where the goal is to find an optimal policy that maximizes the expected discounted total reward plus a policy regularization term. The extant…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-10-22 Xiang Li , Wenhao Yang , Zhihua Zhang

We present a general framework for applying learning algorithms and heuristical guidance to the verification of Markov decision processes (MDPs). The primary goal of our techniques is to improve performance by avoiding an exhaustive…

We study the problem of learning optimal policies in finite-horizon Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) using low-rank reinforcement learning (RL) methods. In finite-horizon MDPs, the policies, and therefore the value functions (VFs) are not…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Sergio Rozada , Jose Luis Orejuela , Antonio G. Marques

In this paper, a sparse Markov decision process (MDP) with novel causal sparse Tsallis entropy regularization is proposed.The proposed policy regularization induces a sparse and multi-modal optimal policy distribution of a sparse MDP. The…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-10-16 Kyungjae Lee , Sungjoon Choi , Songhwai Oh

We introduce the spatiotemporal Markov decision process (STMDP), a special type of Markov decision process that models sequential decision-making problems which are not only characterized by temporal, but also by spatial interaction…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-01-08 M. C. de Jongh , Richard J. Boucherie , M. N. M. van Lieshout