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Representation multi-task learning (MTL) has achieved tremendous success in practice. However, the theoretical understanding of these methods is still lacking. Most existing theoretical works focus on cases where all tasks share the same…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-07-08 Ye Tian , Yuqi Gu , Yang Feng

We present a model-free reinforcement learning algorithm to find an optimal policy for a finite-horizon Markov decision process while guaranteeing a desired lower bound on the probability of satisfying a signal temporal logic (STL)…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2021-09-29 Krishna C. Kalagarla , Rahul Jain , Pierluigi Nuzzo

We study a primal-dual (PD) reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm for online constrained Markov decision processes (CMDPs). Despite its widespread practical use, the existing theoretical literature on PD-RL algorithms for this problem only…

Reinforcement learning algorithms often require finiteness of state and action spaces in Markov decision processes (MDPs) (also called controlled Markov chains) and various efforts have been made in the literature towards the applicability…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-08 Ali Devran Kara , Naci Saldi , Serdar Yüksel

We study online learning in episodic finite-horizon Markov decision processes (MDPs) with convex objective functions, known as the concave utility reinforcement learning (CURL) problem. This setting generalizes RL from linear to convex…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-13 Bianca Marin Moreno , Khaled Eldowa , Pierre Gaillard , Margaux Brégère , Nadia Oudjane

In this work, we consider the popular tree-based search strategy within the framework of reinforcement learning, the Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS), in the context of infinite-horizon discounted cost Markov Decision Process (MDP). While…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-01-14 Devavrat Shah , Qiaomin Xie , Zhi Xu

Interpretability of reinforcement learning policies is essential for many real-world tasks but learning such interpretable policies is a hard problem. Particularly rule-based policies such as decision trees and rules lists are difficult to…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-02-15 Daniël Vos , Sicco Verwer

We study model-free reinforcement learning (RL) in non-stationary finite-horizon episodic Markov decision processes (MDPs) without prior knowledge of the non-stationarity. We focus on the piecewise stationary (PS) setting, where both…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Argyrios Gerogiannis , Yu-Han Huang , Venugopal V. Veeravalli

The Reward-Biased Maximum Likelihood Estimate (RBMLE) for adaptive control of Markov chains was proposed to overcome the central obstacle of what is variously called the fundamental "closed-identifiability problem" of adaptive control, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-18 Akshay Mete , Rahul Singh , Xi Liu , P. R. Kumar

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Kun Long , Yuqiang Li , Xianyi Wu

We provide an algorithm that achieves the optimal regret rate in an unknown weakly communicating Markov Decision Process (MDP). The algorithm proceeds in episodes where, in each episode, it picks a policy using regularization based on the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-05-14 Peter L. Bartlett , Ambuj Tewari

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-10-25 Wonyoung Kim , Garud Iyengar , Assaf Zeevi

A recent theoretical analysis of a Monte-Carlo tree search (MCTS) method properly modified from the ``upper confidence bound applied to trees" (UCT) algorithm established a surprising result, due to a great deal of empirical successes…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-02-04 Hyeong Soo Chang

Kernel ridge regression (KRR), also known as the least-squares support vector machine, is a fundamental method for learning functions from finite samples. While most existing analyses focus on the noisy setting with constant-level label…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-04-14 Jihao Long , Xiaojun Peng , Lei Wu

Non-stationary environments are challenging for reinforcement learning algorithms. If the state transition and/or reward functions change based on latent factors, the agent is effectively tasked with optimizing a behavior that maximizes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-21 Lucas N. Alegre , Ana L. C. Bazzan , Bruno C. da Silva

One key challenge for multi-task Reinforcement learning (RL) in practice is the absence of task indicators. Robust RL has been applied to deal with task ambiguity, but may result in over-conservative policies. To balance the worst-case…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-25 Mengdi Xu , Peide Huang , Yaru Niu , Visak Kumar , Jielin Qiu , Chao Fang , Kuan-Hui Lee , Xuewei Qi , Henry Lam , Bo Li , Ding Zhao

Obtaining no-regret guarantees for reinforcement learning (RL) in the case of problems with continuous state and/or action spaces is still one of the major open challenges in the field. Recently, a variety of solutions have been proposed,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-07 Davide Maran , Alberto Maria Metelli , Matteo Papini , Marcello Restell

Reward-free exploration is a reinforcement learning setting studied by Jin et al. (2020), who address it by running several algorithms with regret guarantees in parallel. In our work, we instead give a more natural adaptive approach for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-08 Emilie Kaufmann , Pierre Ménard , Omar Darwiche Domingues , Anders Jonsson , Edouard Leurent , Michal Valko

We study a new class of MDPs that employs multinomial logit (MNL) function approximation to ensure valid probability distributions over the state space. Despite its significant benefits, incorporating the non-linear function raises…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-17 Long-Fei Li , Yu-Jie Zhang , Peng Zhao , Zhi-Hua Zhou

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