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We revisit offline reinforcement learning on episodic time-homogeneous Markov Decision Processes (MDP). For tabular MDP with $S$ states and $A$ actions, or linear MDP with anchor points and feature dimension $d$, given the collected $K$…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-02-11 Tongzheng Ren , Jialian Li , Bo Dai , Simon S. Du , Sujay Sanghavi

We study learning in periodic Markov Decision Process(MDP), a special type of non-stationary MDP where both the state transition probabilities and reward functions vary periodically, under the average reward maximization setting. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-26 Ayush Aniket , Arpan Chattopadhyay

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 the problem of offline imitation learning in Markov decision processes (MDPs), where the goal is to learn a well-performing policy given a dataset of state-action pairs generated by an expert policy. Complementing a recent line of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-09 Antoine Moulin , Gergely Neu , Luca Viano

We study regret minimization for infinite-horizon average-reward Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) under cost constraints. We start by designing a policy optimization algorithm with carefully designed action-value estimator and bonus term,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-02 Liyu Chen , Rahul Jain , Haipeng Luo

We introduce a new framework of episodic tabular Markov decision processes (MDPs) with adversarial preferences, which we refer to as preference-based MDPs (PbMDPs). Unlike standard episodic MDPs with adversarial losses, where the numerical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-17 Taira Tsuchiya , Shinji Ito , Haipeng Luo

Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning (HRL) approaches have shown successful results in solving a large variety of complex, structured, long-horizon problems. Nevertheless, a full theoretical understanding of this empirical evidence is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-05 Gianluca Drappo , Alberto Maria Metelli , Marcello Restelli

For the misspecified linear Markov decision process (MLMDP) model of Jin et al. [2020], we propose an algorithm with three desirable properties. (P1) Its regret after $K$ episodes scales as $K \max \{ \varepsilon_{\text{mis}},…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-02 Daniel Vial , Advait Parulekar , Sanjay Shakkottai , R. Srikant

This paper studies constrained Markov decision processes (CMDPs) with constraints against stochastic thresholds, aiming at safety of reinforcement learning in unknown and uncertain environments. We leverage a Growing-Window estimator…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-25 Qian Zuo , Fengxiang He

We study reinforcement learning with delayed state observation, where the agent observes the current state after some random number of time steps. We propose an algorithm that combines the augmentation method and the upper confidence bound…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-05 Harin Lee , Kevin Jamieson

This work investigates multi-objective imitation learning: the problem of recovering policies that lie on the Pareto front given demonstrations from multiple Pareto-optimal experts in a Multi-Objective Markov Decision Process (MOMDP).…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Ziyad Sheebaelhamd , Luca Viano , Volkan Cevher , Claire Vernade

We present the first finite time global convergence analysis of policy gradient in the context of infinite horizon average reward Markov decision processes (MDPs). Specifically, we focus on ergodic tabular MDPs with finite state and action…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-12 Navdeep Kumar , Yashaswini Murthy , Itai Shufaro , Kfir Y. Levy , R. Srikant , Shie Mannor

We introduce \texttt{OPO-CMDP}, the first policy optimization algorithm for stochastic Contextual Markov Decision Process (CMDPs) under general offline function approximation. Our approach achieves a high probability regret bound of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Orin Levy , Aviv Rosenberg , Alon Cohen , Yishay Mansour

Imitation learning (IL) is a popular paradigm for training policies in robotic systems when specifying the reward function is difficult. However, despite the success of IL algorithms, they impose the somewhat unrealistic requirement that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-16 Luca Viano , Yu-Ting Huang , Parameswaran Kamalaruban , Craig Innes , Subramanian Ramamoorthy , Adrian Weller

Imitation learning (IL) has achieved considerable success in solving complex sequential decision-making problems. However, current IL methods mainly assume that the environment for learning policies is the same as the environment for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-24 Siyuan Li , Xun Wang , Rongchang Zuo , Kewu Sun , Lingfei Cui , Jishiyu Ding , Peng Liu , Zhe Ma

Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) techniques deal with the problem of deducing a reward function that explains the behavior of an expert agent who is assumed to act optimally in an underlying unknown task. In several problems of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-09 Riccardo Poiani , Gabriele Curti , Alberto Maria Metelli , Marcello Restelli

Offline inverse reinforcement learning (Offline IRL) aims to recover the structure of rewards and environment dynamics that underlie observed actions in a fixed, finite set of demonstrations from an expert agent. Accurate models of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-01 Siliang Zeng , Chenliang Li , Alfredo Garcia , Mingyi Hong

We investigate the problem of best-policy identification in discounted Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) when the learner has access to a generative model. The objective is to devise a learning algorithm returning the best policy as early as…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-05-11 Aymen Al Marjani , Alexandre Proutiere

We study the Stochastic Shortest Path (SSP) problem with a linear mixture transition kernel, where an agent repeatedly interacts with a stochastic environment and seeks to reach certain goal state while minimizing the cumulative cost.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-15 Qiwei Di , Jiafan He , Dongruo Zhou , Quanquan Gu

We study the computational complexity of the infinite-horizon discounted-reward Markov Decision Problem (MDP) with a finite state space $|\mathcal{S}|$ and a finite action space $|\mathcal{A}|$. We show that any randomized algorithm needs a…

Computational Complexity · Computer Science 2017-05-24 Yichen Chen , Mengdi Wang