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Recent theoretical work studies sample-efficient reinforcement learning (RL) extensively in two settings: learning interactively in the environment (online RL), or learning from an offline dataset (offline RL). However, existing algorithms…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-14 Tengyang Xie , Nan Jiang , Huan Wang , Caiming Xiong , Yu Bai

We consider online learning for episodic stochastically constrained Markov decision processes (CMDPs), which plays a central role in ensuring the safety of reinforcement learning. Here the loss function can vary arbitrarily across the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-19 Shuang Qiu , Xiaohan Wei , Zhuoran Yang , Jieping Ye , Zhaoran Wang

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

Recent advances have significantly improved our understanding of the sample complexity of learning in average-reward Markov decision processes (AMDPs) under the generative model. However, much less is known about the constrained…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-23 Yukuan Wei , Xudong Li , Lin F. Yang

We study the Safe Reinforcement Learning (SRL) problem using the Constrained Markov Decision Process (CMDP) formulation in which an agent aims to maximize the expected total reward subject to a safety constraint on the expected total value…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-27 Dongsheng Ding , Xiaohan Wei , Zhuoran Yang , Zhaoran Wang , Mihailo R. Jovanović

Online safe reinforcement learning (RL) plays a key role in dynamic environments, with applications in autonomous driving, robotics, and cybersecurity. The objective is to learn optimal policies that maximize rewards while satisfying safety…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Jiahui Zhu , Kihyun Yu , Dabeen Lee , Xin Liu , Honghao Wei

We study the $(\varepsilon, \delta)$-PAC policy identification problem in finite-horizon episodic Markov Decision Processes. Existing approaches provide finite-time guarantees for approximate settings ($\varepsilon>0$) but suffer from high…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-06 Cyrille Kone , Kevin Jamieson

In many real-world decision problems there is partially observed, hidden or latent information that remains fixed throughout an interaction. Such decision problems can be modeled as Latent Markov Decision Processes (LMDPs), where a latent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-27 Jeongyeol Kwon , Shie Mannor , Constantine Caramanis , Yonathan Efroni

We consider the problem of offline reinforcement learning (RL) -- a well-motivated setting of RL that aims at policy optimization using only historical data. Despite its wide applicability, theoretical understandings of offline RL, such as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-04 Ming Yin , Yu Bai , Yu-Xiang Wang

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) aims to find an optimal policy for Markov decision processes (MDPs) using a pre-collected dataset. In this work, we revisit the linear programming (LP) reformulation of Markov decision processes for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-11 Asuman Ozdaglar , Sarath Pattathil , Jiawei Zhang , Kaiqing Zhang

Sample-efficiency guarantees for offline reinforcement learning (RL) often rely on strong assumptions on both the function classes (e.g., Bellman-completeness) and the data coverage (e.g., all-policy concentrability). Despite the recent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-29 Wenhao Zhan , Baihe Huang , Audrey Huang , Nan Jiang , Jason D. Lee

We study online learning in episodic constrained Markov decision processes (CMDPs), where the learner aims at collecting as much reward as possible over the episodes, while satisfying some long-term constraints during the learning process.…

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-16 Zihan Zhou , Honghao Wei , Lei Ying

We study \emph{online episodic Constrained Markov Decision Processes} (CMDPs) under both stochastic and adversarial constraints. We provide a novel algorithm whose guarantees greatly improve those of the state-of-the-art best-of-both-worlds…

This paper is concerned with offline reinforcement learning (RL), which learns using pre-collected data without further exploration. Effective offline RL would be able to accommodate distribution shift and limited data coverage. However,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-03-11 Gen Li , Laixi Shi , Yuxin Chen , Yuejie Chi , Yuting Wei

Analyzing the Markov decision process (MDP) with continuous state spaces is generally challenging. A recent interesting work \cite{shah2018q} solves MDP with bounded continuous state space by a nearest neighbor $Q$ learning approach, which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-18 Puning Zhao , Lifeng Lai

In offline reinforcement learning (RL), the absence of active exploration calls for attention on the model robustness to tackle the sim-to-real gap, where the discrepancy between the simulated and deployed environments can significantly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-28 He Wang , Laixi Shi , Yuejie Chi

Existing work on linear constrained Markov decision processes (CMDPs) has primarily focused on stochastic settings, where the losses and costs are either fixed or drawn from fixed distributions. However, such formulations are inherently…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Kihyun Yu , Seoungbin Bae , Dabeen Lee

Practical reinforcement learning problems are often formulated as constrained Markov decision process (CMDP) problems, in which the agent has to maximize the expected return while satisfying a set of prescribed safety constraints. In this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-09-23 Shin-ichi Maeda , Hayato Watahiki , Shintarou Okada , Masanori Koyama

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