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We present a reduction from reinforcement learning (RL) to no-regret online learning based on the saddle-point formulation of RL, by which "any" online algorithm with sublinear regret can generate policies with provable performance…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-03 Ching-An Cheng , Remi Tachet des Combes , Byron Boots , Geoff Gordon

We study online reinforcement learning in linear Markov decision processes with adversarial losses and bandit feedback, without prior knowledge on transitions or access to simulators. We introduce two algorithms that achieve improved regret…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-19 Haolin Liu , Chen-Yu Wei , Julian Zimmert

Understanding how to efficiently learn while adhering to safety constraints is essential for using online reinforcement learning in practical applications. However, proving rigorous regret bounds for safety-constrained reinforcement…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-04-29 Benjamin Schiffer , Lucas Janson

We develop several provably efficient model-free reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms for infinite-horizon average-reward Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). We consider both online setting and the setting with access to a simulator. In the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-29 Zihan Zhang , Qiaomin Xie

Switching costs, which capture the costs for changing policies, are regarded as a critical metric in reinforcement learning (RL), in addition to the standard metric of losses (or rewards). However, existing studies on switching costs (with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-10 Ming Shi , Yingbin Liang , Ness Shroff

Reinforcement learning with multinomial logistic (MNL) function approximation has become an important framework due to its flexibility and broad applicability. While existing studies have established regret guarantees under worst-case…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-28 Wonyoung Kim , Min-Hwan Oh , Garud Iyengar , Assaf Zeevi

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-17 Ashish Kumar Jayant , Shalabh Bhatnagar

The classical theory of reinforcement learning (RL) has focused on tabular and linear representations of value functions. Further progress hinges on combining RL with modern function approximators such as kernel functions and deep neural…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-01 Zhuoran Yang , Chi Jin , Zhaoran Wang , Mengdi Wang , Michael I. Jordan

This paper presents the concept of an adaptive safe padding that forces Reinforcement Learning (RL) to synthesise optimal control policies while ensuring safety during the learning process. Policies are synthesised to satisfy a goal,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-24 Mohammadhosein Hasanbeig , Alessandro Abate , Daniel Kroening

Meta reinforcement learning sets a distribution over a set of tasks on which the agent can train at will, then is asked to learn an optimal policy for any test task efficiently. In this paper, we consider a finite set of tasks modeled…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-05 Mirco Mutti , Aviv Tamar

Constrained Markov decision processes (CMDPs) model scenarios of sequential decision making with multiple objectives that are increasingly important in many applications. However, the model is often unknown and must be learned online while…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-30 Krishna C Kalagarla , Rahul Jain , Pierluigi Nuzzo

While quantum reinforcement learning (RL) has attracted a surge of attention recently, its theoretical understanding is limited. In particular, it remains elusive how to design provably efficient quantum RL algorithms that can address the…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2024-06-14 Han Zhong , Jiachen Hu , Yecheng Xue , Tongyang Li , Liwei Wang

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has gained substantial attention across diverse application domains and theoretical investigations. Existing literature on RL theory largely focuses on risk-neutral settings where the decision-maker learns to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-24 Zhengqi Wu , Renyuan Xu

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 problem of multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) with adaptivity constraints -- a new problem motivated by real-world applications where deployments of new policies are costly and the number of policy updates must be…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-05 Dan Qiao , Yu-Xiang Wang

Past research on interactive decision making problems (bandits, reinforcement learning, etc.) mostly focuses on the minimax regret that measures the algorithm's performance on the hardest instance. However, an ideal algorithm should adapt…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-13 Kefan Dong , Tengyu Ma

The optimized certainty equivalent (OCE) is a family of risk measures that cover important examples such as entropic risk, conditional value-at-risk and mean-variance models. In this paper, we propose a new episodic risk-sensitive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-09 Wenhao Xu , Xuefeng Gao , Xuedong He

In many real-world reinforcement learning (RL) problems, besides optimizing the main objective function, an agent must concurrently avoid violating a number of constraints. In particular, besides optimizing performance it is crucial to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-05-22 Yinlam Chow , Ofir Nachum , Edgar Duenez-Guzman , Mohammad Ghavamzadeh

Recent studies have shown that episodic reinforcement learning (RL) is not more difficult than contextual bandits, even with a long planning horizon and unknown state transitions. However, these results are limited to either tabular Markov…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-24 Dongruo Zhou , Quanquan Gu

This paper investigates conservative exploration in reinforcement learning where the performance of the learning agent is guaranteed to be above a certain threshold throughout the learning process. It focuses on the tabular episodic Markov…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-14 Donghao Li , Ruiquan Huang , Cong Shen , Jing Yang