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We consider online learning for episodic stochastically constrained Markov decision processes (CMDPs), which plays a central role in ensuring the safety of reinforcement learning. Here the loss function can vary arbitrarily across the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-19 Shuang Qiu , Xiaohan Wei , Zhuoran Yang , Jieping Ye , Zhaoran Wang

While Bayesian-based exploration often demonstrates superior empirical performance compared to bonus-based methods in model-based reinforcement learning (RL), its theoretical understanding remains limited for model-free settings. Existing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-05 He Wang , Xingyu Xu , Yuejie Chi

We study the problem of nonstochastic bandits with expert advice, extending the setting from finitely many experts to any countably infinite set: A learner aims to maximize the total reward by taking actions sequentially based on bandit…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-29 X. Flora Meng , Tuhin Sarkar , Munther A. Dahleh

Recent developments in digital platforms have highlighted the prevalence of open systems, where agents can arrive and depart over time. While bandit learning in open systems has recently received initial attention, existing work imposes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Mengfan Xu

Model selection in supervised learning provides costless guarantees as if the model that best balances bias and variance was known a priori. We study the feasibility of similar guarantees for cumulative regret minimization in the stochastic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-25 Sanath Kumar Krishnamurthy , Adrienne Margaret Propp , Susan Athey

We study contextual bandits with budget and time constraints, referred to as constrained contextual bandits.The time and budget constraints significantly complicate the exploration and exploitation tradeoff because they introduce complex…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-10-20 Huasen Wu , R. Srikant , Xin Liu , Chong Jiang

In this paper we provide provable regret guarantees for an online meta-learning receding horizon control algorithm in an iterative control setting. We consider the setting where, in each iteration the system to be controlled is a linear…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2022-11-02 Deepan Muthirayan , Pramod P. Khargonekar

We study online learning in unknown Markov games, a problem that arises in episodic multi-agent reinforcement learning where the actions of the opponents are unobservable. We show that in this challenging setting, achieving sublinear regret…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-09 Yi Tian , Yuanhao Wang , Tiancheng Yu , Suvrit Sra

We integrate information-theoretic concepts into the design and analysis of optimistic algorithms and Thompson sampling. By making a connection between information-theoretic quantities and confidence bounds, we obtain results that relate…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-11-25 Xiuyuan Lu , Benjamin Van Roy

In bandit settings, optimizing long-term regret metrics requires exploration, which corresponds to sometimes taking myopically sub-optimal actions. When a long-lived principal merely recommends actions to be executed by a sequence of…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2026-02-25 Ramya Ramalingam , Osbert Bastani , Aaron Roth

Sequential learning with feedback graphs is a natural extension of the multi-armed bandit problem where the problem is equipped with an underlying graph structure that provides additional information - playing an action reveals the losses…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-06 Tomáš Kocák , Alexandra Carpentier

Online reinforcement learning in infinite-horizon Markov decision processes (MDPs) remains less theoretically and algorithmically developed than its episodic counterpart, with many algorithms suffering from high ``burn-in'' costs and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-26 Guy Zamir , Matthew Zurek , Yudong Chen

Recent advances, such as RegretNet, ALGnet, RegretFormer and CITransNet, use deep learning to approximate optimal multi item auctions by relaxing incentive compatibility (IC) and measuring its violation via ex post regret. However, the true…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2026-01-21 Shuyuan You , Zhiqiang Zhuang , Kewen Wang , Zhe Wang

To understand the security threats to reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms, this paper studies poisoning attacks to manipulate \emph{any} order-optimal learning algorithm towards a targeted policy in episodic RL and examines the potential…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-30 Anshuka Rangi , Haifeng Xu , Long Tran-Thanh , Massimo Franceschetti

We consider a problem of learning the reward and policy from expert examples under unknown dynamics. Our proposed method builds on the framework of generative adversarial networks and introduces the empowerment-regularized maximum-entropy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-02-26 Ahmed H. Qureshi , Byron Boots , Michael C. Yip

The literature on game-theoretic equilibrium finding predominantly focuses on single games or their repeated play. Nevertheless, numerous real-world scenarios feature playing a game sampled from a distribution of similar, but not identical…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-02-21 David Sychrovský , Michal Šustr , Elnaz Davoodi , Michael Bowling , Marc Lanctot , Martin Schmid

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

In the classic expert problem, $\Phi$-regret measures the gap between the learner's total loss and that achieved by applying the best action transformation $\phi \in \Phi$. A recent work by Lu et al., [2025] introduces an adaptive algorithm…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-16 Soumita Hait , Ping Li , Haipeng Luo , Mengxiao Zhang

We provide new lower bounds on the regret that must be suffered by adversarial bandit algorithms. The new results show that recent upper bounds that either (a) hold with high-probability or (b) depend on the total lossof the best arm or (c)…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2017-02-28 Sébastien Gerchinovitz , Tor Lattimore

Episodic reinforcement learning and contextual bandits are two widely studied sequential decision-making problems. Episodic reinforcement learning generalizes contextual bandits and is often perceived to be more difficult due to long…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-01 Zihan Zhang , Xiangyang Ji , Simon S. Du