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The optimized certainty equivalent (OCE) is a family of risk measures that cover important examples such as entropic risk, conditional value-at-risk and mean-variance models. In this paper, we propose a new episodic risk-sensitive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-09 Wenhao Xu , Xuefeng Gao , Xuedong He

Robust reinforcement learning (RL) under the average-reward criterion is essential for long-term decision-making, particularly when the environment may differ from its specification. However, a significant gap exists in understanding the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-26 Zachary Roch , Chi Zhang , George Atia , Yue Wang

We study the model-based undiscounted reinforcement learning for partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs). The oracle we consider is the optimal policy of the POMDP with a known environment in terms of the average reward over…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-19 Yi Xiong , Ningyuan Chen , Xuefeng Gao , Xiang Zhou

In this paper, we study sequential decision-making for maximizing the Sharpe ratio (SR) in a stochastic multi-armed bandit (MAB) setting. Unlike standard bandit formulations that maximize cumulative reward, SR optimization requires…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-02 Mohammad Taha Shah , Sabrina Khurshid , Gourab Ghatak

Distributionally Robust Reinforcement Learning (DR-RL) aims to derive a policy optimizing the worst-case performance within a predefined uncertainty set. Despite extensive research, previous DR-RL algorithms have predominantly favored…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-26 Yudan Wang , Shaofeng Zou , Yue Wang

We consider the problem of learning the optimal policy for Markov decision processes with safety constraints. We formulate the problem in a reach-avoid setup. Our goal is to design online reinforcement learning algorithms that ensure safety…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-21 Abhijit Mazumdar , Rafal Wisniewski , Manuela L. Bujorianu

We revisit the classic regret-minimization problem in the stochastic multi-armed bandit setting when the arm-distributions are allowed to be heavy-tailed. Regret minimization has been well studied in simpler settings of either bounded…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-09 Shubhada Agrawal , Sandeep Juneja , Wouter M. Koolen

This paper concerns the central issues of model robustness and sample efficiency in offline reinforcement learning (RL), which aims to learn to perform decision making from history data without active exploration. Due to uncertainties and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-01 Laixi Shi , Yuejie Chi

Value function approximation is important in modern reinforcement learning (RL) problems especially when the state space is (infinitely) large. Despite the importance and wide applicability of value function approximation, its theoretical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-24 Hanlin Zhu , Ruosong Wang , Jason D. Lee

We study the regret of reinforcement learning from offline data generated by a fixed behavior policy in an infinite-horizon discounted Markov decision process (MDP). While existing analyses of common approaches, such as fitted $Q$-iteration…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-13 Yichun Hu , Nathan Kallus , Masatoshi Uehara

We study nonstationary Online Linear Programming (OLP), where $n$ orders arrive sequentially with reward-resource consumption pairs that form a sequence of independent, but not necessarily identically distributed, random vectors. At the…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Haoran Xu , Owen Shen , Peter Glynn , Yinyu Ye , Patrick Jaillet

We develop an online learning algorithm for identifying unlabeled data points that are most informative for training (i.e., active learning). By formulating the active learning problem as the prediction with sleeping experts problem, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-24 Cenk Baykal , Lucas Liebenwein , Dan Feldman , Daniela Rus

Thompson sampling (TS) is a powerful and widely used strategy for sequential decision-making, with applications ranging from Bayesian optimization to reinforcement learning (RL). Despite its success, the theoretical foundations of TS remain…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-24 Jasmine Bayrooti , Sattar Vakili , Amanda Prorok , Carl Henrik Ek

We consider the problem of Imitation Learning (IL) by actively querying noisy expert for feedback. While imitation learning has been empirically successful, much of prior work assumes access to noiseless expert feedback which is not…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-12 Ayush Sekhari , Karthik Sridharan , Wen Sun , Runzhe Wu

Regret matching (RM) -- and its modern variants -- is a foundational online algorithm that has been at the heart of many AI breakthrough results in solving benchmark zero-sum games, such as poker. Yet, surprisingly little is known so far in…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-11-18 Ioannis Anagnostides , Emanuel Tewolde , Brian Hu Zhang , Ioannis Panageas , Vincent Conitzer , Tuomas Sandholm

We study the problem of \emph{dynamic regret minimization} in $K$-armed Dueling Bandits under non-stationary or time varying preferences. This is an online learning setup where the agent chooses a pair of items at each round and observes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-14 Aadirupa Saha , Shubham Gupta

We consider the random design regression model with square loss. We propose a method that aggregates empirical minimizers (ERM) over appropriately chosen random subsets and reduces to ERM in the extreme case, and we establish sharp oracle…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2017-07-04 Alexander Rakhlin , Karthik Sridharan , Alexandre B. Tsybakov

Constrained Markov decision processes (CMDPs) model scenarios of sequential decision making with multiple objectives that are increasingly important in many applications. However, the model is often unknown and must be learned online while…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-30 Krishna C Kalagarla , Rahul Jain , Pierluigi Nuzzo

Online bilevel optimization (OBO) has emerged as a powerful framework for many machine learning problems. Prior works have developed several algorithms that minimize the standard bilevel local regret or the window-averaged bilevel local…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Tingkai Jia , Haiguang Wang , Cheng Chen

We study online learning with bandit feedback (i.e. learner has access to only zeroth-order oracle) where cost/reward functions $\f_t$ admit a "pseudo-1d" structure, i.e. $\f_t(\w) = \loss_t(\pred_t(\w))$ where the output of $\pred_t$ is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-16 Aadirupa Saha , Nagarajan Natarajan , Praneeth Netrapalli , Prateek Jain