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To overcome the curses of dimensionality and modeling of Dynamic Programming (DP) methods to solve Markov Decision Process (MDP) problems, Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods are adopted in practice. Contrary to traditional RL algorithms…
Constrained Markov games offer a formal mathematical framework for modeling multi-agent reinforcement learning problems where the behavior of the agents is subject to constraints. In this work, we focus on the recently introduced class of…
Markov decision processes (MDPs) are the defacto frame-work for sequential decision making in the presence ofstochastic uncertainty. A classical optimization criterion forMDPs is to maximize the expected discounted-sum pay-off, which…
In the optimization of dynamical systems, the variables typically have constraints. Such problems can be modeled as a constrained Markov Decision Process (CMDP). This paper considers a model-free approach to the problem, where the…
This paper considers the best policy identification (BPI) problem in online Constrained Markov Decision Processes (CMDPs). We are interested in algorithms that are model-free, have low regret, and identify an approximately optimal policy…
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,…
Action-constrained reinforcement learning (RL) is a widely-used approach in various real-world applications, such as scheduling in networked systems with resource constraints and control of a robot with kinematic constraints. While the…
In this work, we study discrete-time Markov decision processes (MDPs) under constraints with Borel state and action spaces and where all the performance functions have the same form of the expected total reward (ETR) criterion over the…
We study the convergence of several natural policy gradient (NPG) methods in infinite-horizon discounted Markov decision processes with regular policy parametrizations. For a variety of NPGs and reward functions we show that the…
This paper studies the problem of Anytime-Competitive Markov Decision Process (A-CMDP). Existing works on Constrained Markov Decision Processes (CMDPs) aim to optimize the expected reward while constraining the expected cost over random…
This paper considers the problem of finding near-optimal Markovian randomized (MR) policies for finite-state-action, infinite-horizon, constrained risk-sensitive Markov decision processes (CRSMDPs). Constraints are in the form of standard…
We study offline reinforcement learning (RL) with linear MDPs under the infinite-horizon discounted setting which aims to learn a policy that maximizes the expected discounted cumulative reward using a pre-collected dataset. Existing…
We study online learning in \emph{constrained MDPs} (CMDPs), focusing on the goal of attaining sublinear strong regret and strong cumulative constraint violation. Differently from their standard (weak) counterparts, these metrics do not…
We study the policy testing problem in discounted Markov decision processes (MDPs) in the fixed-confidence setting under a generative model with static sampling. The goal is to decide whether the value of a given policy exceeds a specified…
In this paper, we revisit and improve the convergence of policy gradient (PG), natural PG (NPG) methods, and their variance-reduced variants, under general smooth policy parametrizations. More specifically, with the Fisher information…
We consider infinite-horizon $\gamma$-discounted (linear) constrained Markov decision processes (CMDPs) where the objective is to find a policy that maximizes the expected cumulative reward subject to expected cumulative constraints. Given…
While policy optimization algorithms have played an important role in recent empirical success of Reinforcement Learning (RL), the existing theoretical understanding of policy optimization remains rather limited -- they are either…
Incorporating safety is an essential prerequisite for broadening the practical applications of reinforcement learning in real-world scenarios. To tackle this challenge, Constrained Markov Decision Processes (CMDPs) are leveraged, which…
Natural policy gradient (NPG) methods with entropy regularization achieve impressive empirical success in reinforcement learning problems with large state-action spaces. However, their convergence properties and the impact of entropy…
During initial iterations of training in most Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms, agents perform a significant number of random exploratory steps. In the real world, this can limit the practicality of these algorithms as it can lead to…