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We study risk-sensitive Reinforcement Learning (RL), where we aim to maximize the Conditional Value at Risk (CVaR) with a fixed risk tolerance $\tau$. Prior theoretical work studying risk-sensitive RL focuses on the tabular Markov Decision…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-21 Yulai Zhao , Wenhao Zhan , Xiaoyan Hu , Ho-fung Leung , Farzan Farnia , Wen Sun , Jason D. Lee

An important problem in reinforcement learning is designing agents that learn to solve tasks safely in an environment. A common solution is for a human expert to define either a penalty in the reward function or a cost to be minimised when…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-02 Geraud Nangue Tasse , Tamlin Love , Mark Nemecek , Steven James , Benjamin Rosman

We study reinforcement learning in non-episodic factored Markov decision processes (FMDPs). We propose two near-optimal and oracle-efficient algorithms for FMDPs. Assuming oracle access to an FMDP planner, they enjoy a Bayesian and a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-06-09 Ziping Xu , Ambuj Tewari

The automatic synthesis of a policy through reinforcement learning (RL) from a given set of formal requirements depends on the construction of a reward signal and consists of the iterative application of many policy-improvement steps. The…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-21 Luigi Berducci , Radu Grosu

Despite the wealth of research into provably efficient reinforcement learning algorithms, most works focus on tabular representation and thus struggle to handle exponentially or infinitely large state-action spaces. In this paper, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-10 Ahmed Touati , Adrien Ali Taiga , Marc G. Bellemare

Robust reinforcement learning (RL) under the average-reward criterion is essential for long-term decision-making, particularly when the environment may differ from its specification. However, a significant gap exists in understanding the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-26 Zachary Roch , Chi Zhang , George Atia , Yue Wang

Dynamic real-time optimization (DRTO) is a challenging task due to the fact that optimal operating conditions must be computed in real time. The main bottleneck in the industrial application of DRTO is the presence of uncertainty. Many…

Learning to control an unknown dynamical system with respect to high-level temporal specifications is an important problem in control theory. We present the first regret-free online algorithm for learning a controller for linear temporal…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-06-09 Rupak Majumdar , Mahmoud Salamati , Sadegh Soudjani

Many physical systems have underlying safety considerations that require that the policy employed ensures the satisfaction of a set of constraints. The analytical formulation usually takes the form of a Constrained Markov Decision Process…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-03 Aria HasanzadeZonuzy , Archana Bura , Dileep Kalathil , Srinivas Shakkottai

We develop provably safe and convergent reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms for control of nonlinear dynamical systems, bridging the gap between the hard safety guarantees of control theory and the convergence guarantees of RL theory.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-08 Wesley A. Suttle , Vipul K. Sharma , Krishna C. Kosaraju , S. Sivaranjani , Ji Liu , Vijay Gupta , Brian M. Sadler

We propose novel classical and quantum online algorithms for learning finite-horizon and infinite-horizon average-reward Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). Our algorithms are based on a hybrid exploration-generative reinforcement learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-12 Andris Ambainis , Joao F. Doriguello , Debbie Lim

We develop a stochastic approximation-type algorithm to solve finite state/action, infinite-horizon, risk-aware Markov decision processes. Our algorithm has two loops. The inner loop computes the risk by solving a stochastic saddle-point…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-12-05 Wenjie Huang , William B. Haskell

We consider an online learning problem where the learner interacts with a Markov decision process in a sequence of episodes, where the reward function is allowed to change between episodes in an adversarial manner and the learner only gets…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-15 Gergely Neu , Julia Olkhovskaya

This paper studies constrained Markov decision processes (CMDPs) with constraints against stochastic thresholds, aiming at safety of reinforcement learning in unknown and uncertain environments. We leverage a Growing-Window estimator…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-25 Qian Zuo , Fengxiang He

To ensure the usefulness of Reinforcement Learning (RL) in real systems, it is crucial to ensure they are robust to noise and adversarial attacks. In adversarial RL, an external attacker has the power to manipulate the victim agent's…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-18 Jeremy McMahan , Young Wu , Xiaojin Zhu , Qiaomin Xie

The problem of reinforcement learning in an unknown and discrete Markov Decision Process (MDP) under the average-reward criterion is considered, when the learner interacts with the system in a single stream of observations, starting from an…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-03-06 Mohammad Sadegh Talebi , Odalric-Ambrym Maillard

We study off-dynamics Reinforcement Learning (RL), where the policy training and deployment environments are different. To deal with this environmental perturbation, we focus on learning policies robust to uncertainties in transition…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-01 Zhishuai Liu , Weixin Wang , Pan Xu

We study safe online reinforcement learning in Constrained Markov Decision Processes (CMDPs) under strong regret and violation metrics, which forbid error cancellation over time. Existing primal-dual methods that achieve sublinear strong…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-04 Qian Zuo , Zhiyong Wang , Fengxiang He

Fairness plays a crucial role in various multi-agent systems (e.g., communication networks, financial markets, etc.). Many multi-agent dynamical interactions can be cast as Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). While existing research has…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-02 Peizhong Ju , Arnob Ghosh , Ness B. Shroff

Safety in reinforcement learning (RL) is a key property in both training and execution in many domains such as autonomous driving or finance. In this paper, we formalize it with a constrained RL formulation in the distributional RL setting.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-01 Jianyi Zhang , Paul Weng