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Reinforcement Learning algorithms are primarily focused on learning a policy that maximizes expected return. As a result, the learned policy can exploit one or few reward sources. However, in many natural situations, it is desirable to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Sagalpreet Singh , Rishi Saket , Aravindan Raghuveer

Risk-averse total-reward Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) offer a promising framework for modeling and solving undiscounted infinite-horizon objectives. Existing model-based algorithms for risk measures like the entropic risk measure (ERM)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-27 Xihong Su , Jia Lin Hau , Gersi Doko , Kishan Panaganti , Marek Petrik

The curse of dimensionality is a widely known issue in reinforcement learning (RL). In the tabular setting where the state space $\mathcal{S}$ and the action space $\mathcal{A}$ are both finite, to obtain a nearly optimal policy with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-28 Bingyan Wang , Yuling Yan , Jianqing Fan

Learning and optimal control under robust Markov decision processes (MDPs) have received increasing attention, yet most existing theory, algorithms, and applications focus on finite-horizon or discounted models. Long-run average-reward…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-12-12 Shengbo Wang , Nian Si

Most reinforcement learning methods are based upon the key assumption that the transition dynamics and reward functions are fixed, that is, the underlying Markov decision process is stationary. However, in many real-world applications, this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-09-23 Yash Chandak , Georgios Theocharous , Shiv Shankar , Martha White , Sridhar Mahadevan , Philip S. Thomas

In Reinforcement Learning (RL), it is commonly assumed that an immediate reward signal is generated for each action taken by the agent, helping the agent maximize cumulative rewards to obtain the optimal policy. However, in many real-world…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-29 Yuting Tang , Xin-Qiang Cai , Yao-Xiang Ding , Qiyu Wu , Guoqing Liu , Masashi Sugiyama

Non-stationary domains, where unforeseen changes happen, present a challenge for agents to find an optimal policy for a sequential decision making problem. This work investigates a solution to this problem that combines Markov Decision…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-05-04 Leonardo A. Ferreira , Reinaldo A. C. Bianchi , Paulo E. Santos , Ramon Lopez de Mantaras

A novel reinforcement learning scheme to synthesize policies for continuous-space Markov decision processes (MDPs) is proposed. This scheme enables one to apply model-free, off-the-shelf reinforcement learning algorithms for finite MDPs to…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2020-03-03 Abolfazl Lavaei , Fabio Somenzi , Sadegh Soudjani , Ashutosh Trivedi , Majid Zamani

Multi-task representation learning (MTRL) is an approach that learns shared latent representations across related tasks, facilitating collaborative learning that improves the overall learning efficiency. This paper studies MTRL for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-07 Yaoze Guo , Shana Moothedath

We consider large-scale Markov decision processes (MDPs) with an unknown cost function and employ stochastic convex optimization tools to address the problem of imitation learning, which consists of learning a policy from a finite set of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-04 Angeliki Kamoutsi , Goran Banjac , John Lygeros

This paper presents an efficient procedure for multi-objective model checking of long-run average reward (aka: mean pay-off) and total reward objectives as well as their combination. We consider this for Markov automata, a compositional…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2021-01-08 Tim Quatmann , Joost-Pieter Katoen

Multi-objective Markov decision processes are a special kind of multi-objective optimization problem that involves sequential decision making while satisfying the Markov property of stochastic processes. Multi-objective reinforcement…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-22 Sherif Abdelfattah , Kathryn Kasmarik , Jiankun Hu

In online Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL), the learner can collect samples about the dynamics of the environment to improve its estimate of the reward function. Since IRL suffers from identifiability issues, many theoretical works on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-10 Filippo Lazzati , Mirco Mutti , Alberto Maria Metelli

We consider the problem of learning the optimal policy for infinite-horizon Markov decision processes (MDPs). For this purpose, some variant of Stochastic Mirror Descent is proposed for convex programming problems with Lipschitz-continuous…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-03-01 Daniil Tiapkin , Alexander Gasnikov

We propose RUDDER, a novel reinforcement learning approach for delayed rewards in finite Markov decision processes (MDPs). In MDPs the Q-values are equal to the expected immediate reward plus the expected future rewards. The latter are…

We consider undiscounted reinforcement learning in Markov decision processes (MDPs) where both the reward functions and the state-transition probabilities may vary (gradually or abruptly) over time. For this problem setting, we propose an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-09-11 Pratik Gajane , Ronald Ortner , Peter Auer

This paper investigates value function approximation in the context of zero-sum Markov games, which can be viewed as a generalization of the Markov decision process (MDP) framework to the two-agent case. We generalize error bounds from MDPs…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2013-01-07 Michail Lagoudakis , Ron Parr

In the framework of MDP, although the general reward function takes three arguments-current state, action, and successor state; it is often simplified to a function of two arguments-current state and action. The former is called a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-12-03 Shuai Ma , Jia Yuan Yu

The online Markov decision process (MDP) is a generalization of the classical Markov decision process that incorporates changing reward functions. In this paper, we propose practical online MDP algorithms with policy iteration and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-10-16 Yao Ma , Hao Zhang , Masashi Sugiyama

Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) describes the problem of learning an unknown reward function of a Markov Decision Process (MDP) from observed behavior of an agent. Since the agent's behavior originates in its policy and MDP policies…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2016-04-14 Michael Herman , Tobias Gindele , Jörg Wagner , Felix Schmitt , Wolfram Burgard