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Reinforcement learning algorithms typically assume rewards to be sampled from light-tailed distributions, such as Gaussian or bounded. However, a wide variety of real-world systems generate rewards that follow heavy-tailed distributions. We…
We study the gap-dependent bounds of two important algorithms for on-policy Q-learning for finite-horizon episodic tabular Markov Decision Processes (MDPs): UCB-Advantage (Zhang et al. 2020) and Q-EarlySettled-Advantage (Li et al. 2021).…
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…
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…
Reinforcement learning (RL) in Markov decision processes (MDPs) with large state spaces is a challenging problem. The performance of standard RL algorithms degrades drastically with the dimensionality of state space. However, in practice,…
Most known regret bounds for reinforcement learning are either episodic or assume an environment without traps. We derive a regret bound without making either assumption, by allowing the algorithm to occasionally delegate an action to an…
We consider model-based reinforcement learning in finite Markov De- cision Processes (MDPs), focussing on so-called optimistic strategies. In MDPs, optimism can be implemented by carrying out extended value it- erations under a constraint…
We study online learning in \emph{constrained MDPs} (CMDPs), focusing on the goal of attaining sublinear strong regret and strong cumulative constraint violation. Differently from their standard (weak) counterparts, these metrics do not…
N-discount optimality was introduced as a hierarchical form of policy- and value-function optimality, with Blackwell optimality lying at the top level of the hierarchy Veinott (1969); Blackwell (1962). We formalize notions of myopic…
We investigate episodic Markov Decision Processes with heavy-tailed losses (HTMDPs). Existing approaches for HTMDPs are conservative in stochastic environments and lack adaptivity in adversarial regimes. In this work, we propose algorithms…
We study algorithms for average-cost reinforcement learning problems with value function approximation. Our starting point is the recently proposed POLITEX algorithm, a version of policy iteration where the policy produced in each iteration…
In the stochastic contextual low-rank matrix bandit problem, the expected reward of an action is given by the inner product between the action's feature matrix and some fixed, but initially unknown $d_1$ by $d_2$ matrix $\Theta^*$ with rank…
We present a new algorithm based on posterior sampling for learning in constrained Markov decision processes (CMDP) in the infinite-horizon undiscounted setting. The algorithm achieves near-optimal regret bounds while being advantageous…
Constrained Markov Decision Processes (CMDPs) are one of the common ways to model safe reinforcement learning problems, where constraint functions model the safety objectives. Lagrangian-based dual or primal-dual algorithms provide…
This paper investigates the regret associated with the Distributionally Robust Control (DRC) strategies used to address multistage optimization problems where the involved probability distributions are not known exactly, but rather are…
This paper studies the problem of Anytime-Competitive Markov Decision Process (A-CMDP). Existing works on Constrained Markov Decision Processes (CMDPs) aim to optimize the expected reward while constraining the expected cost over random…
For continuous state-action space scenarios, classical reinforcement learning (RL) theory predominantly focuses on low-rank Markov decision processes (MDPs), which provide sample-efficient guarantees at the expense of restrictive structural…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms are known to suffer from the curse of dimensionality, which refers to the fact that large-scale problems often lead to exponentially high sample complexity. A common solution is to use deep neural…
The general sequential decision-making problem, which includes Markov decision processes (MDPs) and partially observable MDPs (POMDPs) as special cases, aims at maximizing a cumulative reward by making a sequence of decisions based on a…
The contextual combinatorial semi-bandit problem with linear payoff functions is a decision-making problem in which a learner chooses a set of arms with the feature vectors in each round under given constraints so as to maximize the sum of…