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Related papers: Average-Reward Learning and Planning with Options

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This work focuses on off-policy evaluation (OPE) with function approximation in infinite-horizon undiscounted Markov decision processes (MDPs). For MDPs that are ergodic and linear (i.e. where rewards and dynamics are linear in some known…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-24 Nevena Lazic , Dong Yin , Mehrdad Farajtabar , Nir Levine , Dilan Gorur , Chris Harris , Dale Schuurmans

The Adversarial Markov Decision Process (AMDP) is a learning framework that deals with unknown and varying tasks in decision-making applications like robotics and recommendation systems. A major limitation of the AMDP formalism, however, is…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-05-06 Sang Bin Moon , Abolfazl Hashemi

We investigate model-based reinforcement learning in contextual Markov decision processes (C-MDPs) in which the context is unobserved and induces confounding in the offline dataset. In such settings, conventional model-learning methods are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-09 Nishanth Venkatesh , Andreas A. Malikopoulos

Partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) have recently become popular among many AI researchers because they serve as a natural model for planning under uncertainty. Value iteration is a well-known algorithm for finding…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2011-06-02 N. L. Zhang , W. Zhang

This work studies discrete-time discounted Markov decision processes with continuous state and action spaces and addresses the inverse problem of inferring a cost function from observed optimal behavior. We first consider the case in which…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-05-27 Angeliki Kamoutsi , Peter Schmitt-Förster , Tobias Sutter , Volkan Cevher , John Lygeros

Sequential decisions in volatile, high-stakes settings require more than maximizing expected return; they require principled uncertainty management. This paper presents the Uncertainty-Aware Markov Decision Process (UAMDP), a unified…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-19 Michal Koren , Or Peretz , Tai Dinh , Philip S. Yu

Recently regular decision processes have been proposed as a well-behaved form of non-Markov decision process. Regular decision processes are characterised by a transition function and a reward function that depend on the whole history,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-05-19 Alessandro Ronca , Giuseppe De Giacomo

We present a general framework for applying learning algorithms and heuristical guidance to the verification of Markov decision processes (MDPs). The primary goal of our techniques is to improve performance by avoiding an exhaustive…

We study the offline data-driven sequential decision making problem in the framework of Markov decision process (MDP). In order to enhance the generalizability and adaptivity of the learned policy, we propose to evaluate each policy by a…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2021-11-11 Zhengling Qi , Peng Liao

We propose a new reinforcement learning algorithm for partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDP) based on spectral decomposition methods. While spectral methods have been previously employed for consistent learning of (passive)…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-06-20 Kamyar Azizzadenesheli , Alessandro Lazaric , Animashree Anandkumar

We are interested in risk constraints for infinite horizon discrete time Markov decision processes (MDPs). Starting with average reward MDPs, we show that increasing concave stochastic dominance constraints on the empirical distribution of…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2012-06-21 William B. Haskell , Rahul Jain

We consider Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) where the rewards are unknown and may change in an adversarial manner. We provide an algorithm that achieves state-of-the-art regret bound of $O( \sqrt{\tau (\ln|S|+\ln|A|)T}\ln(T))$, where $S$…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-28 Adrian Rivera Cardoso , He Wang , Huan Xu

We study offline reinforcement learning in average-reward MDPs, which presents increased challenges from the perspectives of distribution shift and non-uniform coverage, and has been relatively underexamined from a theoretical perspective.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-23 Matthew Zurek , Guy Zamir , Yudong Chen

In Markov decision processes (MDPs), quantile risk measures such as Value-at-Risk are a standard metric for modeling RL agents' preferences for certain outcomes. This paper proposes a new Q-learning algorithm for quantile optimization in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-01 Jia Lin Hau , Erick Delage , Esther Derman , Mohammad Ghavamzadeh , Marek Petrik

We introduce the use of reinforcement learning for indirect mechanisms, working with the existing class of sequential price mechanisms, which generalizes both serial dictatorship and posted price mechanisms and essentially characterizes all…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2021-05-07 Gianluca Brero , Alon Eden , Matthias Gerstgrasser , David C. Parkes , Duncan Rheingans-Yoo

Policy gradient methods are among the most effective methods in challenging reinforcement learning problems with large state and/or action spaces. However, little is known about even their most basic theoretical convergence properties,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-16 Alekh Agarwal , Sham M. Kakade , Jason D. Lee , Gaurav Mahajan

We study the relation between different Markov Decision Process (MDP) frameworks in the machine learning and econometrics literatures, including the standard MDP, the entropy and general regularized MDP, and stochastic MDP, where the latter…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-08-19 Tien Mai , Patrick Jaillet

Learning a predictive model of the mean return, or value function, plays a critical role in many reinforcement learning algorithms. Distributional reinforcement learning (DRL) has been shown to improve performance by modeling the value…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-08 Ju-Seung Byun , Andrew Perrault

While there is an extensive body of research on the analysis of Value Iteration (VI) for discounted cumulative-reward MDPs, prior work on analyzing VI for (undiscounted) average-reward MDPs has been limited, and most prior results focus on…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-02-10 Jongmin Lee , Ernest K. Ryu

In this paper we provide faster algorithms for approximately solving discounted Markov Decision Processes in multiple parameter regimes. Given a discounted Markov Decision Process (DMDP) with $|S|$ states, $|A|$ actions, discount factor…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2020-12-24 Aaron Sidford , Mengdi Wang , Xian Wu , Yinyu Ye