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Reinforcement learning is widely used in applications where one needs to perform sequential decisions while interacting with the environment. The problem becomes more challenging when the decision requirement includes satisfying some safety…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-15 Qinbo Bai , Amrit Singh Bedi , Mridul Agarwal , Alec Koppel , Vaneet Aggarwal

The constrained Markov decision process (CMDP) framework emerges as an important reinforcement learning approach for imposing safety or other critical objectives while maximizing cumulative reward. However, the current understanding of how…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-11 Tian Tian , Lin F. Yang , Csaba Szepesvári

Constrained decision-making is essential for designing safe policies in real-world control systems, yet simulated environments often fail to capture real-world adversities. We consider the problem of learning a policy that will maximize the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Sourav Ganguly , Kishan Panaganti , Arnob Ghosh , Adam Wierman

We study reinforcement learning by combining recent advances in regularized linear programming formulations with the classical theory of stochastic approximation. Motivated by the challenge of designing algorithms that leverage off-policy…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-15 Axel Friedrich Wolter , Tobias Sutter

We study entropy-regularized constrained Markov decision processes (CMDPs) under the soft-max parameterization, in which an agent aims to maximize the entropy-regularized value function while satisfying constraints on the expected total…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-10 Donghao Ying , Yuhao Ding , Javad Lavaei

Robust Markov Decision Processes (RMDPs) have recently been recognized as a valuable and promising approach to discovering a policy with creditable performance, particularly in the presence of a dynamic environment and estimation errors in…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-06-04 Zhenwei Lin , Chenyu Xue , Qi Deng , Yinyu Ye

We consider a discounted cost constrained Markov decision process (CMDP) policy optimization problem, in which an agent seeks to maximize a discounted cumulative reward subject to a number of constraints on discounted cumulative utilities.…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-11-21 Sihan Zeng , Thinh T. Doan , Justin Romberg

The canonical solution methodology for finite constrained Markov decision processes (CMDPs), where the objective is to maximize the expected infinite-horizon discounted rewards subject to the expected infinite-horizon discounted costs…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-05-11 Sami Khairy , Prasanna Balaprakash , Lin X. Cai

This paper investigates infinite-horizon average reward Constrained Markov Decision Processes (CMDPs) with general parametrization. We propose a Primal-Dual Natural Actor-Critic algorithm that adeptly manages constraints while ensuring a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-11 Yang Xu , Swetha Ganesh , Washim Uddin Mondal , Qinbo Bai , Vaneet Aggarwal

Efficient exploration is a central problem in reinforcement learning and is often formalized as maximizing the entropy of the state-action occupancy measure. While unconstrained maximum-entropy exploration is relatively well understood,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-01 Florian Wolf , Ilyas Fatkhullin , Niao He

Multi-objective optimization models that encode ordered sequential constraints provide a solution to model various challenging problems including encoding preferences, modeling a curriculum, and enforcing measures of safety. A recently…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-09-16 Kyle Hollins Wray , Stas Tiomkin , Mykel J. Kochenderfer , Pieter Abbeel

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 present the first finite time global convergence analysis of policy gradient in the context of infinite horizon average reward Markov decision processes (MDPs). Specifically, we focus on ergodic tabular MDPs with finite state and action…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-12 Navdeep Kumar , Yashaswini Murthy , Itai Shufaro , Kfir Y. Levy , R. Srikant , Shie Mannor

Constrained Reinforcement Learning (CRL) tackles sequential decision-making problems where agents are required to achieve goals by maximizing the expected return while meeting domain-specific constraints, which are often formulated as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-13 Alessandro Montenegro , Marco Mussi , Matteo Papini , Alberto Maria Metelli

Markov Decision Processes are classically solved using Value Iteration and Policy Iteration algorithms. Recent interest in Reinforcement Learning has motivated the study of methods inspired by optimization, such as gradient ascent. Among…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-05 Sajad Khodadadian , Prakirt Raj Jhunjhunwala , Sushil Mahavir Varma , Siva Theja Maguluri

We study policy optimization in an infinite horizon, $\gamma$-discounted constrained Markov decision process (CMDP). Our objective is to return a policy that achieves large expected reward with a small constraint violation. We consider the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-12 Arushi Jain , Sharan Vaswani , Reza Babanezhad , Csaba Szepesvari , Doina Precup

Dynamic optimization of mean and variance in Markov decision processes (MDPs) is a long-standing challenge caused by the failure of dynamic programming. In this paper, we propose a new approach to find the globally optimal policy for…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-02-28 Li Xia , Shuai Ma

We consider discounted infinite-horizon constrained Markov decision processes (CMDPs), where the goal is to find an optimal policy that maximizes the expected cumulative reward while satisfying expected cumulative constraints. Motivated by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Tingting Ni , Maryam Kamgarpour

We study policy optimization for Markov decision processes (MDPs) with multiple reward value functions, which are to be jointly optimized according to given criteria such as proportional fairness (smooth concave scalarization), hard…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-19 Ruida Zhou , Tao Liu , Dileep Kalathil , P. R. Kumar , Chao Tian

We consider (stochastic) softmax policy gradient (PG) methods for bandits and tabular Markov decision processes (MDPs). While the PG objective is non-concave, recent research has used the objective's smoothness and gradient domination…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-01 Michael Lu , Matin Aghaei , Anant Raj , Sharan Vaswani