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Related papers: Reward is enough for convex MDPs

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Recent work has formalized the reward hypothesis through the lens of expected utility theory, by interpreting reward as utility. Hausner's foundational work showed that dropping the continuity axiom leads to a generalization of expected…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Mehran Shakerinava , Siamak Ravanbakhsh , Adam Oberman

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

A popular perspective in Reinforcement learning (RL) casts the problem as probabilistic inference on a graphical model of the Markov decision process (MDP). The core object of study is the probability of each state-action pair being visited…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-23 Jean Tarbouriech , Tor Lattimore , Brendan O'Donoghue

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) aims at learning an optimal strategy using a pre-collected dataset without further interactions with the environment. While various algorithms have been proposed for offline RL in the previous literature,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-02 Wei Xiong , Han Zhong , Chengshuai Shi , Cong Shen , Liwei Wang , Tong Zhang

Markov decision process (MDP) is a decision making framework where a decision maker is interested in maximizing the expected discounted value of a stream of rewards received at future stages at various states which are visited according to…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-12-19 Hoang Nam Nguyen , Abdel Lisser , Vikas Vikram Singh

We develop an algorithmic framework for solving convex optimization problems using no-regret game dynamics. By converting the problem of minimizing a convex function into an auxiliary problem of solving a min-max game in a sequential…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-21 Jun-Kun Wang , Jacob Abernethy , Kfir Y. Levy

In this work, we consider the problem of collaborative multi-user reinforcement learning. In this setting there are multiple users with the same state-action space and transition probabilities but with different rewards. Under the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-23 Naman Agarwal , Prateek Jain , Suhas Kowshik , Dheeraj Nagaraj , Praneeth Netrapalli

Sufficient conditions are identified under which the value function and the optimal strategy of a Markov decision process (MDP) are even and quasi-convex in the state. The key idea behind these conditions is the following. First, sufficient…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2017-09-12 Jhelum Chakravorty , Aditya Mahajan

How to learn an effective reinforcement learning-based model for control tasks from high-level visual observations is a practical and challenging problem. A key to solving this problem is to learn low-dimensional state representations from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-27 Jianda Chen , Sinno Jialin Pan

We consider Markov decision processes (MDPs) with multiple limit-average (or mean-payoff) objectives. There exist two different views: (i) the expectation semantics, where the goal is to optimize the expected mean-payoff objective, and (ii)…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2019-03-14 Krishnendu Chatterjee , Zuzana Křetínská , Jan Křetínský

To ensure the usefulness of Reinforcement Learning (RL) in real systems, it is crucial to ensure they are robust to noise and adversarial attacks. In adversarial RL, an external attacker has the power to manipulate the victim agent's…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-18 Jeremy McMahan , Young Wu , Xiaojin Zhu , Qiaomin Xie

In robust Markov decision processes (MDPs), the uncertainty in the transition kernel is addressed by finding a policy that optimizes the worst-case performance over an uncertainty set of MDPs. While much of the literature has focused on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-02 Yue Wang , Alvaro Velasquez , George Atia , Ashley Prater-Bennette , Shaofeng Zou

To date, distributional reinforcement learning (distributional RL) methods have exclusively focused on the discounted setting, where an agent aims to optimize a discounted sum of rewards over time. In this work, we extend distributional RL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-14 Juan Sebastian Rojas , Chi-Guhn Lee

Although Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms have found tremendous success in simulated domains, they often cannot directly be applied to physical systems, especially in cases where there are hard constraints to satisfy (e.g. on safety…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-28 Harsh Satija , Philip Amortila , Joelle Pineau

We study Markov decision processes (MDPs) with multiple limit-average (or mean-payoff) functions. We consider two different objectives, namely, expectation and satisfaction objectives. Given an MDP with k limit-average functions, in the…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2015-07-01 Tomáš Brázdil , Václav Brožek , Krishnendu Chatterjee , Vojtěch Forejt , Antonín Kučera

Reinforcement learning (RL) is attracting attention as an effective way to solve sequential optimization problems that involve high dimensional state/action space and stochastic uncertainties. Many such problems involve constraints…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-01 Haeun Yoo , Victor M. Zavala , Jay H. Lee

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

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

We study offline Reinforcement Learning in large infinite-horizon discounted Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) when the reward and transition models are linearly realizable under a known feature map. Starting from the classic linear-program…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-24 Gergely Neu , Nneka Okolo

In many sequential decision-making problems one is interested in minimizing an expected cumulative cost while taking into account \emph{risk}, i.e., increased awareness of events of small probability and high consequences. Accordingly, the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-04-07 Yinlam Chow , Mohammad Ghavamzadeh , Lucas Janson , Marco Pavone
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