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Many physical systems have underlying safety considerations that require that the policy employed ensures the satisfaction of a set of constraints. The analytical formulation usually takes the form of a Constrained Markov Decision Process…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-03 Aria HasanzadeZonuzy , Archana Bura , Dileep Kalathil , Srinivas Shakkottai

We present an optimistic Q-learning algorithm for regret minimization in average reward reinforcement learning under an additional assumption on the underlying MDP that for all policies, the time to visit some frequent state $s_0$ is finite…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-17 Priyank Agrawal , Shipra Agrawal

The Centralized Training with Decentralized Execution (CTDE) paradigm is widely used in cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning. However, conventional methods based on CTDE can suffer from value underestimation and converge to…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Ruoning Zhang , Siying Wang , Wenyu Chen , Yang Zhou , Zhitong Zhao , Zixuan Zhang , Ruijie Zhang , Stefano V. Albrecht

Safety exploration can be regarded as a constrained Markov decision problem where the expected long-term cost is constrained. Previous off-policy algorithms convert the constrained optimization problem into the corresponding unconstrained…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-28 Hengrui Zhang , Youfang Lin , Sheng Han , Shuo Wang , Kai Lv

This paper studies safe Reinforcement Learning (safe RL) with linear function approximation and under hard instantaneous constraints where unsafe actions must be avoided at each step. Existing studies have considered safe RL with hard…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-25 Honghao Wei , Xin Liu , Lei Ying

We study safe reinforcement learning in finite-horizon linear mixture constrained Markov decision processes (CMDPs) with adversarial rewards under full-information feedback and an unknown transition kernel. We propose a primal-dual policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Kihyun Yu , Seoungbin Bae , Dabeen Lee

Safe exploration presents a major challenge in reinforcement learning (RL): when active data collection requires deploying partially trained policies, we must ensure that these policies avoid catastrophically unsafe regions, while still…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-27 Homanga Bharadhwaj , Aviral Kumar , Nicholas Rhinehart , Sergey Levine , Florian Shkurti , Animesh Garg

Most provably-efficient learning algorithms introduce optimism about poorly-understood states and actions to encourage exploration. We study an alternative approach for efficient exploration, posterior sampling for reinforcement learning…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2013-12-30 Ian Osband , Daniel Russo , Benjamin Van Roy

Efficient exploration is critical in cooperative deep Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL). In this work, we propose an exploration method that effectively encourages cooperative exploration based on the idea of sequential…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-17 Xutong Zhao , Yangchen Pan , Chenjun Xiao , Sarath Chandar , Janarthanan Rajendran

Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms have shown tremendous success in simulation environments, but their application to real-world problems faces significant challenges, with safety being a major concern. In particular, enforcing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-19 Weiye Zhao , Rui Chen , Yifan Sun , Tianhao Wei , Changliu Liu

Given a set of trajectories demonstrating the execution of a task safely in a constrained MDP with observable rewards but with unknown constraints and non-observable costs, we aim to find a policy that maximizes the likelihood of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-02 George Papadopoulos , George A. Vouros

Safety in reinforcement learning has become increasingly important in recent years. Yet, existing solutions either fail to strictly avoid choosing unsafe actions, which may lead to catastrophic results in safety-critical systems, or fail to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-14 Sanae Amani , Christos Thrampoulidis , Lin F. Yang

We propose novel classical and quantum online algorithms for learning finite-horizon and infinite-horizon average-reward Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). Our algorithms are based on a hybrid exploration-generative reinforcement learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-12 Andris Ambainis , Joao F. Doriguello , Debbie Lim

Risk sensitivity has become a central theme in reinforcement learning (RL), where convex risk measures and robust formulations provide principled ways to model preferences beyond expected return. Recent extensions to multi-agent RL (MARL)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-12 Runyu Zhang , Na Li , Asuman Ozdaglar , Jeff Shamma , Gioele Zardini

We study privacy-preserving exploration in sequential decision-making for environments that rely on sensitive data such as medical records. In particular, we focus on solving the problem of reinforcement learning (RL) subject to the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-24 Dung Daniel Ngo , Giuseppe Vietri , Zhiwei Steven Wu

This work studies the statistical limits of uniform convergence for offline policy evaluation (OPE) problems with model-based methods (for episodic MDP) and provides a unified framework towards optimal learning for several well-motivated…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-25 Ming Yin , Yu-Xiang Wang

Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents can solve diverse tasks but often exhibit unsafe behavior. Constrained Markov Decision Processes (CMDPs) address this by enforcing safety constraints, yet existing methods either sacrifice reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-18 Nikola Milosevic , Johannes Müller , Nico Scherf

We propose a new learning framework that captures the tiered structure of many real-world user-interaction applications, where the users can be divided into two groups based on their different tolerance on exploration risks and should be…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-28 Jiawei Huang , Li Zhao , Tao Qin , Wei Chen , Nan Jiang , Tie-Yan Liu

Reinforcement learning (RL) agents are vulnerable to adversarial disturbances, which can deteriorate task performance or compromise safety specifications. Existing methods either address safety requirements under the assumption of no…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-14 Zeyang Li , Chuxiong Hu , Yunan Wang , Yujie Yang , Shengbo Eben Li

Reinforcement Learning (RL), recognized as an efficient learning approach, has achieved remarkable success across multiple fields and applications, including gaming, robotics, and autonomous vehicles. Classical single-agent reinforcement…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-13 Jingpu Yang , Helin Wang , Qirui Zhao , Zhecheng Shi , Zirui Song , Miao Fang