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In many applications of Reinforcement Learning (RL), it is critically important that the algorithm performs safely, such that instantaneous hard constraints are satisfied at each step, and unsafe states and actions are avoided. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-10 Ming Shi , Yingbin Liang , Ness Shroff

Randomized experiments (a.k.a. A/B tests) are a powerful tool for estimating treatment effects, to inform decisions making in business, healthcare and other applications. In many problems, the treatment has a lasting effect that evolves…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-17 Ziyang Tang , Yiheng Duan , Stephanie Zhang , Lihong Li

Despite rapid progress in theoretical reinforcement learning (RL) over the last few years, most of the known guarantees are worst-case in nature, failing to take advantage of structure that may be known a priori about a given RL problem at…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-26 Noah Golowich , Ankur Moitra

We study risk-sensitive Reinforcement Learning (RL), where we aim to maximize the Conditional Value at Risk (CVaR) with a fixed risk tolerance $\tau$. Prior theoretical work studying risk-sensitive RL focuses on the tabular Markov Decision…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-21 Yulai Zhao , Wenhao Zhan , Xiaoyan Hu , Ho-fung Leung , Farzan Farnia , Wen Sun , Jason D. Lee

Achieving the no-regret property for Reinforcement Learning (RL) problems in continuous state and action-space environments is one of the major open problems in the field. Existing solutions either work under very specific assumptions or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-01 Davide Maran , Alberto Maria Metelli , Matteo Papini , Marcello Restelli

Reinforcement learning (RL) problems are fundamental in online decision-making and have been instrumental in finding an optimal policy for Markov decision processes (MDPs). Function approximations are usually deployed to handle large or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Jiashuo Jiang , Yiming Zong , Yinyu Ye

We consider online learning in episodic loop-free Markov decision processes (MDPs), where the loss function can change arbitrarily between episodes, and the transition function is not known to the learner. We show…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-21 Aviv Rosenberg , Yishay Mansour

The curse of dimensionality renders Reinforcement Learning (RL) impractical in many real-world settings with exponentially large state and action spaces. Yet, many environments exhibit exploitable structure that can accelerate learning. To…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-16 Thomas van Vuren , Fiona Sloothaak , Maarten G. Wolf , Jaron Sanders

Standard reinforcement learning (RL) assumes that an agent can observe a reward for each state-action pair. However, in practical applications, it is often difficult and costly to collect a reward for each state-action pair. While there…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-18 Yihan Du , Anna Winnicki , Gal Dalal , Shie Mannor , R. Srikant

Many practical decision-making problems involve tasks whose success depends on the entire system history, rather than on achieving a state with desired properties. Markovian Reinforcement Learning (RL) approaches are not suitable for such…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-17 Alessandro Trapasso , Luca Iocchi , Fabio Patrizi

A common setting of reinforcement learning (RL) is a Markov decision process (MDP) in which the environment is a stochastic discrete-time dynamical system. Whereas MDPs are suitable in such applications as video-games or puzzles, physical…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-11-29 Pavel Osinenko , Dmitrii Dobriborsci , Grigory Yaremenko , Georgiy Malaniya

Model-based offline reinforcement learning (RL) aims to find highly rewarding policy, by leveraging a previously collected static dataset and a dynamics model. While the dynamics model learned through reuse of the static dataset, its…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-01 Kaiyang Guo , Yunfeng Shao , Yanhui Geng

Recursion is the fundamental paradigm to finitely describe potentially infinite objects. As state-of-the-art reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms cannot directly reason about recursion, they must rely on the practitioner's ingenuity in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-24 Ernst Moritz Hahn , Mateo Perez , Sven Schewe , Fabio Somenzi , Ashutosh Trivedi , Dominik Wojtczak

Most reinforcement learning methods are based upon the key assumption that the transition dynamics and reward functions are fixed, that is, the underlying Markov decision process is stationary. However, in many real-world applications, this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-09-23 Yash Chandak , Georgios Theocharous , Shiv Shankar , Martha White , Sridhar Mahadevan , Philip S. Thomas

This paper proposes a computationally tractable algorithm for learning infinite-horizon average-reward linear mixture Markov decision processes (MDPs) under the Bellman optimality condition. Our algorithm for linear mixture MDPs achieves a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-22 Woojin Chae , Kihyuk Hong , Yufan Zhang , Ambuj Tewari , Dabeen Lee

We propose novel classical and quantum online algorithms for learning finite-horizon and infinite-horizon average-reward Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). Our algorithms are based on a hybrid exploration-generative reinforcement learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-12 Andris Ambainis , Joao F. Doriguello , Debbie Lim

This paper addresses the problem of model-free reinforcement learning for Robust Markov Decision Process (RMDP) with large state spaces. The goal of the RMDP framework is to find a policy that is robust against the parameter uncertainties…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-15 Kishan Panaganti , Dileep Kalathil

We study the offline reinforcement learning (offline RL) problem, where the goal is to learn a reward-maximizing policy in an unknown Markov Decision Process (MDP) using the data coming from a policy $\mu$. In particular, we consider the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-19 Ming Yin , Yu-Xiang Wang

This paper studies model-based reinforcement learning (RL) for regret minimization. We focus on finite-horizon episodic RL where the transition model $P$ belongs to a known family of models $\mathcal{P}$, a special case of which is when…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-02 Alex Ayoub , Zeyu Jia , Csaba Szepesvari , Mengdi Wang , Lin F. Yang

This paper studies the computation of robust deterministic policies for Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) in the Lightning Does Not Strike Twice (LDST) model of Mannor, Mebel and Xu (ICML '12). In this model, designed to provide robustness…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-12-18 Fei Wu , Erik Demeulemeester , Jannik Matuschke