English
Related papers

Related papers: Nearly Horizon-Free Offline Reinforcement Learning

200 papers

A self-learning optimal control algorithm for episodic fixed-horizon manufacturing processes with time-discrete control actions is proposed and evaluated on a simulated deep drawing process. The control model is built during consecutive…

Systems and Control · Computer Science 2020-01-07 Johannes Dornheim , Norbert Link , Peter Gumbsch

A central issue lying at the heart of online reinforcement learning (RL) is data efficiency. While a number of recent works achieved asymptotically minimal regret in online RL, the optimality of these results is only guaranteed in a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-30 Zihan Zhang , Yuxin Chen , Jason D. Lee , Simon S. Du

In this paper we consider the problem of learning an $\epsilon$-optimal policy for a discounted Markov Decision Process (MDP). Given an MDP with $S$ states, $A$ actions, the discount factor $\gamma \in (0,1)$, and an approximation threshold…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-25 Zihan Zhang , Yuan Zhou , Xiangyang Ji

There have been many recent advances on provably efficient Reinforcement Learning (RL) in problems with rich observation spaces. However, all these works share a strong realizability assumption about the optimal value function of the true…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-23 Christoph Dann , Yishay Mansour , Mehryar Mohri , Ayush Sekhari , Karthik Sridharan

We study the $(\varepsilon, \delta)$-PAC policy identification problem in finite-horizon episodic Markov Decision Processes. Existing approaches provide finite-time guarantees for approximate settings ($\varepsilon>0$) but suffer from high…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-06 Cyrille Kone , Kevin Jamieson

We study reinforcement learning for continuous-time Markov decision processes (MDPs) in the finite-horizon episodic setting. In contrast to discrete-time MDPs, the inter-transition times of a continuous-time MDP are exponentially…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-04 Xuefeng Gao , Xun Yu Zhou

Reward-free reinforcement learning (RL) considers the setting where the agent does not have access to a reward function during exploration, but must propose a near-optimal policy for an arbitrary reward function revealed only after…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-22 Andrew Wagenmaker , Yifang Chen , Max Simchowitz , Simon S. Du , Kevin Jamieson

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

Algorithms developed under stationary Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) often face challenges in non-stationary environments, and infinite-horizon formulations may not directly apply to finite-horizon tasks. To address these limitations, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-03 Zhizuo Chen , Theodore T. Allen

Motivated by the many real-world applications of reinforcement learning (RL) that require safe-policy iterations, we consider the problem of off-policy evaluation (OPE) -- the problem of evaluating a new policy using the historical data…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-04-02 Tengyang Xie , Yifei Ma , Yu-Xiang Wang

We consider the optimal sample complexity theory of tabular reinforcement learning (RL) for maximizing the infinite horizon discounted reward in a Markov decision process (MDP). Optimal worst-case complexity results have been developed for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-03 Shengbo Wang , Jose Blanchet , Peter Glynn

Model-free reinforcement learning is known to be memory and computation efficient and more amendable to large scale problems. In this paper, two model-free algorithms are introduced for learning infinite-horizon average-reward Markov…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-26 Chen-Yu Wei , Mehdi Jafarnia-Jahromi , Haipeng Luo , Hiteshi Sharma , Rahul Jain

Much of reinforcement learning theory is built on top of oracles that are computationally hard to implement. Specifically for learning near-optimal policies in Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs), existing algorithms…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-08 Noah Golowich , Ankur Moitra , Dhruv Rohatgi

Safety is a fundamental challenge in reinforcement learning (RL), particularly in real-world applications such as autonomous driving, robotics, and healthcare. To address this, Constrained Markov Decision Processes (CMDPs) are commonly used…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-18 Chang Liu , Yunfan Li , Lin F. Yang

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

We study reinforcement learning with linear function approximation and finite-memory approximations for partially observed Markov decision processes (POMDPs). We first present an algorithm for the value evaluation of finite-memory feedback…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-05-22 Ali Devran Kara

Constrained Markov Decision Processes (CMDPs) formalize sequential decision-making problems whose objective is to minimize a cost function while satisfying constraints on various cost functions. In this paper, we consider the setting of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-09-25 Krishna C. Kalagarla , Rahul Jain , Pierluigi Nuzzo

The goal of reinforcement learning is estimating a policy that maps states to actions and maximizes the cumulative reward of a Markov Decision Process (MDP). This is oftentimes achieved by estimating first the optimal (reward) value…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-29 Sergio Rozada , Antonio G. Marques

Offline reinforcement learning enables agents to leverage large pre-collected datasets of environment transitions to learn control policies, circumventing the need for potentially expensive or unsafe online data collection. Significant…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-17 Cong Lu , Philip J. Ball , Jack Parker-Holder , Michael A. Osborne , Stephen J. Roberts

To overcome the curses of dimensionality and modeling of Dynamic Programming (DP) methods to solve Markov Decision Process (MDP) problems, Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods are adopted in practice. Contrary to traditional RL algorithms…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-08-24 Arghyadip Roy , Vivek Borkar , Abhay Karandikar , Prasanna Chaporkar