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Related papers: A Unified Algorithm for Stochastic Path Problems

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Stochastic shortest path (SSP) is a well-known problem in planning and control, in which an agent has to reach a goal state in minimum total expected cost. In the learning formulation of the problem, the agent is unaware of the environment…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-25 Alon Cohen , Haim Kaplan , Yishay Mansour , Aviv Rosenberg

We study the stochastic shortest path (SSP) problem in reinforcement learning with linear function approximation, where the transition kernel is represented as a linear mixture of unknown models. We call this class of SSP problems as linear…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-06 Yifei Min , Jiafan He , Tianhao Wang , Quanquan Gu

We study the problem of learning in the stochastic shortest path (SSP) setting, where an agent seeks to minimize the expected cost accumulated before reaching a goal state. We design a novel model-based algorithm EB-SSP that carefully skews…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-13 Jean Tarbouriech , Runlong Zhou , Simon S. Du , Matteo Pirotta , Michal Valko , Alessandro Lazaric

We study the Stochastic Shortest Path (SSP) problem with a linear mixture transition kernel, where an agent repeatedly interacts with a stochastic environment and seeks to reach certain goal state while minimizing the cumulative cost.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-15 Qiwei Di , Jiafan He , Dongruo Zhou , Quanquan Gu

Policy optimization is among the most popular and successful reinforcement learning algorithms, and there is increasing interest in understanding its theoretical guarantees. In this work, we initiate the study of policy optimization for the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-08 Liyu Chen , Haipeng Luo , Aviv Rosenberg

We study the Stochastic Shortest Path (SSP) problem in which an agent has to reach a goal state in minimum total expected cost. In the learning formulation of the problem, the agent has no prior knowledge about the costs and dynamics of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-10 Alon Cohen , Yonathan Efroni , Yishay Mansour , Aviv Rosenberg

We consider the problem of online reinforcement learning for the Stochastic Shortest Path (SSP) problem modeled as an unknown MDP with an absorbing state. We propose PSRL-SSP, a simple posterior sampling-based reinforcement learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-11 Mehdi Jafarnia-Jahromi , Liyu Chen , Rahul Jain , Haipeng Luo

Many popular reinforcement learning problems (e.g., navigation in a maze, some Atari games, mountain car) are instances of the episodic setting under its stochastic shortest path (SSP) formulation, where an agent has to achieve a goal state…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-08-18 Jean Tarbouriech , Evrard Garcelon , Michal Valko , Matteo Pirotta , Alessandro Lazaric

In this paper we propose two algorithms in the tabular setting and an algorithm for the function approximation setting for the Stochastic Shortest Path (SSP) problem. SSP problems form an important class of problems in Reinforcement…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-03 Soumyajit Guin , Shalabh Bhatnagar

We study the sample complexity of learning an $\epsilon$-optimal policy in the Stochastic Shortest Path (SSP) problem. We first derive sample complexity bounds when the learner has access to a generative model. We show that there exists a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-12 Liyu Chen , Andrea Tirinzoni , Matteo Pirotta , Alessandro Lazaric

Stochastic shortest path (SSP) is a well-known problem in planning and control, in which an agent has to reach a goal state in minimum total expected cost. In this paper we present the adversarial SSP model that also accounts for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-06 Aviv Rosenberg , Yishay Mansour

We study the adversarial Stochastic Shortest Path (SSP) problem with sparse costs under full-information feedback. In the known transition setting, existing bounds based on Online Mirror Descent (OMD) with negative-entropy regularization…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-04 Emmeran Johnson , Alberto Rumi , Ciara Pike-Burke , Patrick Rebeschini

We introduce two new no-regret algorithms for the stochastic shortest path (SSP) problem with a linear MDP that significantly improve over the only existing results of (Vial et al., 2021). Our first algorithm is computationally efficient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-21 Liyu Chen , Rahul Jain , Haipeng Luo

We study reward maximisation in a wide class of structured stochastic multi-armed bandit problems, where the mean rewards of arms satisfy some given structural constraints, e.g. linear, unimodal, sparse, etc. Our aim is to develop methods…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-07-03 Rémy Degenne , Han Shao , Wouter M. Koolen

This paper studies the safe reinforcement learning problem formulated as an episodic finite-horizon tabular constrained Markov decision process with an unknown transition kernel and stochastic reward and cost functions. We propose a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-15 Kihyun Yu , Duksang Lee , William Overman , Dabeen Lee

We propose an algorithm that uses linear function approximation (LFA) for stochastic shortest path (SSP). Under minimal assumptions, it obtains sublinear regret, is computationally efficient, and uses stationary policies. To our knowledge,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-30 Daniel Vial , Advait Parulekar , Sanjay Shakkottai , R. Srikant

We define the problem of linear Contextual Stochastic Shortest Path (CSSP), where at the beginning of each episode, the learner observes an adversarially chosen context that determines the MDP through a fixed but unknown linear function.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-18 Dor Polikar , Alon Cohen

Goal-oriented Reinforcement Learning, where the agent needs to reach the goal state while simultaneously minimizing the cost, has received significant attention in real-world applications. Its theoretical formulation, stochastic shortest…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-13 Ming Yin , Wenjing Chen , Mengdi Wang , Yu-Xiang Wang

We study stochastic linear bandits where, in each round, the learner receives a set of actions (i.e., feature vectors), from which it chooses an element and obtains a stochastic reward. The expected reward is a fixed but unknown linear…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-04 Tianyuan Jin , Kyoungseok Jang , Nicolò Cesa-Bianchi

Multi-agent systems (MAS) are central to applications such as swarm robotics and traffic routing, where agents must coordinate in a decentralized manner to achieve a common objective. Stochastic Shortest Path (SSP) problems provide a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-16 Utkarsh U. Chavan , Prashant Trivedi , Nandyala Hemachandra
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