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Understanding how to efficiently learn while adhering to safety constraints is essential for using online reinforcement learning in practical applications. However, proving rigorous regret bounds for safety-constrained reinforcement…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-04-29 Benjamin Schiffer , Lucas Janson

Recently, there has been a surge of interest in analyzing the non-asymptotic behavior of model-free reinforcement learning algorithms. However, the performance of such algorithms in non-ideal environments, such as in the presence of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-06 Sreejeet Maity , Aritra Mitra

We study risk-sensitive multi-agent reinforcement learning under general-sum Markov games, where agents optimize the entropic risk measure of rewards with possibly diverse risk preferences. We show that using the regret naively adapted from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-07 Yingjie Fei , Ruitu Xu

Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms typically deal with maximizing the expected cumulative return (discounted or undiscounted, finite or infinite horizon). However, several crucial applications in the real world, such as drug discovery,…

We study online transfer reinforcement learning (RL) in episodic Markov decision processes, where experience from related source tasks is available during learning on a target task. A fundamental difficulty is that task similarity is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Elynn Chen , Enpei Zhang , Jinhang Chai , Yujun Yan

The upper confidence reinforcement learning (UCRL2) algorithm introduced in (Jaksch et al., 2010) is a popular method to perform regret minimization in unknown discrete Markov Decision Processes under the average-reward criterion. Despite…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-14 Hippolyte Bourel , Odalric-Ambrym Maillard , Mohammad Sadegh Talebi

As reinforcement learning algorithms are being applied to increasingly complicated and realistic tasks, it is becoming increasingly difficult to solve such problems within a practical time frame. Hence, we focus on a \textit{satisficing}…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-04-16 Akihiro Tamatsukuri , Tatsuji Takahashi

Reinforcement learning (RL) for exponential-utility optimization in discounted Markov decision processes (MDPs) lacks principled value-based algorithms. We address this gap in the fixed risk-aversion setting. Building on the Bellman-type…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Gugan Thoppe , L. A. Prashanth , Ankur Naskar , Sanjay Bhat

We consider the regret minimization problem in reinforcement learning (RL) in the episodic setting. In many real-world RL environments, the state and action spaces are continuous or very large. Existing approaches establish regret…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-29 Sayak Ray Chowdhury , Rafael Oliveira

Robust reinforcement learning (RL) aims to find a policy that optimizes the worst-case performance in the face of uncertainties. In this paper, we focus on action robust RL with the probabilistic policy execution uncertainty, in which,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-21 Guanlin Liu , Zhihan Zhou , Han Liu , Lifeng Lai

We propose a simple model selection approach for algorithms in stochastic bandit and reinforcement learning problems. As opposed to prior work that (implicitly) assumes knowledge of the optimal regret, we only require that each base…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-25 Aldo Pacchiano , Christoph Dann , Claudio Gentile , Peter Bartlett

We initiate the study of multi-stage episodic reinforcement learning under adversarial corruptions in both the rewards and the transition probabilities of the underlying system extending recent results for the special case of stochastic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-02 Thodoris Lykouris , Max Simchowitz , Aleksandrs Slivkins , Wen Sun

The objective in a traditional reinforcement learning (RL) problem is to find a policy that optimizes the expected value of a performance metric such as the infinite-horizon cumulative discounted or long-run average cost/reward. In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-25 Prashanth L. A. , Michael Fu

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

Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) policies have been shown to be vulnerable to small adversarial noise in observations. Such adversarial noise can have disastrous consequences in safety-critical environments. For instance, a self-driving…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-28 Roman Belaire , Pradeep Varakantham , Thanh Nguyen , David Lo

Reinforcement learning utilizing kernel ridge regression to predict the expected value function represents a powerful method with great representational capacity. This setting is a highly versatile framework amenable to analytical results.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-01 Sattar Vakili , Julia Olkhovskaya

In this paper, we present a novel method for computing the optimal feedback gain of the infinite-horizon Linear Quadratic Regulator (LQR) problem via an ordinary differential equation. We introduce a novel continuous-time Bellman error,…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-04-17 Armin Gießler , Albertus Johannes Malan , Sören Hohmann

We present a reduction from reinforcement learning (RL) to no-regret online learning based on the saddle-point formulation of RL, by which "any" online algorithm with sublinear regret can generate policies with provable performance…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-03 Ching-An Cheng , Remi Tachet des Combes , Byron Boots , Geoff Gordon

Offline reinforcement learning learns policies from fixed datasets without further environment interaction. A key challenge in this setting is epistemic uncertainty, arising from limited or biased data coverage, particularly when the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-09 Abhilash Reddy Chenreddy , Erick Delage

We study the problem of nonepisodic reinforcement learning (RL) for nonlinear dynamical systems, where the system dynamics are unknown and the RL agent has to learn from a single trajectory, i.e., without resets. We propose Nonepisodic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-12 Bhavya Sukhija , Lenart Treven , Florian Dörfler , Stelian Coros , Andreas Krause