English
Related papers

Related papers: Policy Optimization in Adversarial MDPs: Improved …

200 papers

Markov Decision Problems (MDPs) provide a foundational framework for modelling sequential decision-making across diverse domains, guided by optimality criteria such as discounted and average rewards. However, these criteria have inherent…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-08-26 Dibyangshu Mukherjee , Shivaram Kalyanakrishnan

We study reinforcement learning with linear function approximation, unknown transition, and adversarial losses in the bandit feedback setting. Specifically, we focus on linear mixture MDPs whose transition kernel is a linear mixture model.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-08 Long-Fei Li , Peng Zhao , Zhi-Hua Zhou

Markov decision processes (MDPs) is viewed as an optimization of an objective function over certain linear operators over general function spaces. A new existence result is established for the existence of optimal policies in general MDPs,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-01 Abhishek Gupta , Aditya Mahajan

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

We study \emph{online episodic Constrained Markov Decision Processes} (CMDPs) under both stochastic and adversarial constraints. We provide a novel algorithm whose guarantees greatly improve those of the state-of-the-art best-of-both-worlds…

We propose and study a general framework for regularized Markov decision processes (MDPs) where the goal is to find an optimal policy that maximizes the expected discounted total reward plus a policy regularization term. The extant…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-10-22 Xiang Li , Wenhao Yang , Zhihua Zhang

We consider the best-of-both-worlds problem for learning an episodic Markov Decision Process through $T$ episodes, with the goal of achieving $\widetilde{\mathcal{O}}(\sqrt{T})$ regret when the losses are adversarial and simultaneously…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-19 Tiancheng Jin , Longbo Huang , Haipeng Luo

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has gained substantial attention across diverse application domains and theoretical investigations. Existing literature on RL theory largely focuses on risk-neutral settings where the decision-maker learns to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-24 Zhengqi Wu , Renyuan Xu

Model-free reinforcement learning algorithms combined with value function approximation have recently achieved impressive performance in a variety of application domains. However, the theoretical understanding of such algorithms is limited,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-12 Botao Hao , Nevena Lazic , Yasin Abbasi-Yadkori , Pooria Joulani , Csaba Szepesvari

We formulate a multi-armed bandit (MAB) approach to choosing expert policies online in Markov decision processes (MDPs). Given a set of expert policies trained on a state and action space, the goal is to maximize the cumulative reward of…

Systems and Control · Computer Science 2017-07-19 Eric Mazumdar , Roy Dong , Vicenç Rúbies Royo , Claire Tomlin , S. Shankar Sastry

In a low-rank linear bandit problem, the reward of an action (represented by a matrix of size $d_1 \times d_2$) is the inner product between the action and an unknown low-rank matrix $\Theta^*$. We propose an algorithm based on a novel…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-10-20 Yangyi Lu , Amirhossein Meisami , Ambuj Tewari

This paper studies policy optimization algorithms for multi-agent reinforcement learning. We begin by proposing an algorithm framework for two-player zero-sum Markov Games in the full-information setting, where each iteration consists of a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-26 Runyu Zhang , Qinghua Liu , Huan Wang , Caiming Xiong , Na Li , Yu Bai

This paper explores the realm of infinite horizon average reward Constrained Markov Decision Processes (CMDPs). To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first to delve into the regret and constraint violation analysis of average…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-31 Qinbo Bai , Washim Uddin Mondal , Vaneet Aggarwal

We study the policy testing problem in discounted Markov decision processes (MDPs) in the fixed-confidence setting under a generative model with static sampling. The goal is to decide whether the value of a given policy exceeds a specified…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-04-21 Kaito Ariu , Po-An Wang , Alexandre Proutiere , Kenshi Abe

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

In the classic multi-armed bandits problem, the goal is to have a policy for dynamically operating arms that each yield stochastic rewards with unknown means. The key metric of interest is regret, defined as the gap between the expected…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2010-11-23 Yi Gai , Bhaskar Krishnamachari , Rahul Jain

We consider the problem of learning to optimize an unknown Markov decision process (MDP). We show that, if the MDP can be parameterized within some known function class, we can obtain regret bounds that scale with the dimensionality, rather…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2014-11-04 Ian Osband , Benjamin Van Roy

We study the repeated principal-agent bandit game, where the principal indirectly interacts with the unknown environment by proposing incentives for the agent to play arms. Most existing work assumes the agent has full knowledge of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Junyan Liu , Lillian J. Ratliff

Any reinforcement learning algorithm that applies to all Markov decision processes (MDPs) will suffer $\Omega(\sqrt{SAT})$ regret on some MDP, where $T$ is the elapsed time and $S$ and $A$ are the cardinalities of the state and action…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2014-11-04 Ian Osband , Benjamin Van Roy

Best-of-both-worlds algorithms for online learning which achieve near-optimal regret in both the adversarial and the stochastic regimes have received growing attention recently. Existing techniques often require careful adaptation to every…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-21 Christoph Dann , Chen-Yu Wei , Julian Zimmert