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Markov decision processes (MDPs) provide a fundamental model for sequential decision making under process uncertainty. A classical synthesis task is to compute for a given MDP a winning policy that achieves a desired specification. However,…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2024-07-18 Roman Andriushchenko , Milan Češka , Sebastian Junges , Filip Macák

We investigate the classical active pure exploration problem in Markov Decision Processes, where the agent sequentially selects actions and, from the resulting system trajectory, aims at identifying the best policy as fast as possible. We…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-10-26 Aymen Al Marjani , Aurélien Garivier , Alexandre Proutiere

Dynamic Programming (DP) provides standard algorithms to solve Markov Decision Processes. However, these algorithms generally do not optimize a scalar objective function. In this paper, we draw connections between DP and (constrained)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-30 Nino Vieillard , Olivier Pietquin , Matthieu Geist

This paper proposes new, end-to-end deep reinforcement learning algorithms for learning two-player zero-sum Markov games. Different from prior efforts on training agents to beat a fixed set of opponents, our objective is to find the Nash…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-08 Zihan Ding , Dijia Su , Qinghua Liu , Chi Jin

This paper discusses algorithms for solving Markov decision processes (MDPs) that have monotone optimal policies. We propose a two-stage alternating convex optimization scheme that can accelerate the search for an optimal policy by…

Systems and Control · Computer Science 2017-04-04 Robert Mattila , Cristian R. Rojas , Vikram Krishnamurthy , Bo Wahlberg

Policy Iteration (PI) is a classical family of algorithms to compute an optimal policy for any given Markov Decision Problem (MDP). The basic idea in PI is to begin with some initial policy and to repeatedly update the policy to one from an…

We address the problem of finding an optimal policy in a Markov decision process under a restricted policy class defined by the convex hull of a set of base policies. This problem is of great interest in applications in which a number of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-02-28 Ershad Banijamali , Yasin Abbasi-Yadkori , Mohammad Ghavamzadeh , Nikos Vlassis

In reinforcement learning (RL) , one of the key components is policy evaluation, which aims to estimate the value function (i.e., expected long-term accumulated reward) of a policy. With a good policy evaluation method, the RL algorithms…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-09-25 Yue Wang , Wei Chen , Yuting Liu , Zhi-Ming Ma , Tie-Yan Liu

Value iteration is a fundamental algorithm for solving Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). It computes the maximal $n$-step payoff by iterating $n$ times a recurrence equation which is naturally associated to the MDP. At the same time, value…

Formal Languages and Automata Theory · Computer Science 2019-04-30 Nikhil Balaji , Stefan Kiefer , Petr Novotný , Guillermo A. Pérez , Mahsa Shirmohammadi

Many applications -- including power systems, robotics, and economics -- involve a dynamical system interacting with a stochastic and hard-to-model environment. We adopt a reinforcement learning approach to control such systems.…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-08-26 Abed AlRahman Al Makdah , Oliver Kosut , Lalitha Sankar , Shaofeng Zou

We study decentralized policy learning in Markov games where we control a single agent to play with nonstationary and possibly adversarial opponents. Our goal is to develop a no-regret online learning algorithm that (i) takes actions based…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-06 Wenhao Zhan , Jason D. Lee , Zhuoran Yang

We study the problem of learning minimax policies in zero-sum matrix games. Fiegel et al. (2025) recently showed that achieving last-iterate convergence in this setting is harder when the players are uncoupled, by proving a lower bound on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-17 Come Fiegel , Pierre Menard , Tadashi Kozuno , Michal Valko , Vianney Perchet

The works of (Daskalakis et al., 2009, 2022; Jin et al., 2022; Deng et al., 2023) indicate that computing Nash equilibria in multi-player Markov games is a computationally hard task. This fact raises the question of whether or not…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2023-05-30 Fivos Kalogiannis , Ioannis Panageas

Markov games provide a powerful framework for modeling strategic multi-agent interactions in dynamic environments. Traditionally, convergence properties of decentralized learning algorithms in these settings have been established only for…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2025-06-13 Chinmay Maheshwari , Manxi Wu , Shankar Sastry

In this paper, we present exploitability descent, a new algorithm to compute approximate equilibria in two-player zero-sum extensive-form games with imperfect information, by direct policy optimization against worst-case opponents. We prove…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-06-15 Edward Lockhart , Marc Lanctot , Julien Pérolat , Jean-Baptiste Lespiau , Dustin Morrill , Finbarr Timbers , Karl Tuyls

We study infinite-horizon discounted two-player zero-sum Markov games, and develop a decentralized algorithm that provably converges to the set of Nash equilibria under self-play. Our algorithm is based on running an Optimistic Gradient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-08 Chen-Yu Wei , Chung-Wei Lee , Mengxiao Zhang , Haipeng Luo

We study continuous action reinforcement learning problems in which it is crucial that the agent interacts with the environment only through safe policies, i.e.,~policies that do not take the agent to undesirable situations. We formulate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-02-13 Yinlam Chow , Ofir Nachum , Aleksandra Faust , Edgar Duenez-Guzman , Mohammad Ghavamzadeh

We study model-based and model-free policy optimization in a class of nonzero-sum stochastic dynamic games called linear quadratic (LQ) deep structured games. In such games, players interact with each other through a set of weighted…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2020-12-15 Masoud Roudneshin , Jalal Arabneydi , Amir G. Aghdam

We study episodic two-player zero-sum Markov games (MGs) in the offline setting, where the goal is to find an approximate Nash equilibrium (NE) policy pair based on a dataset collected a priori. When the dataset does not have uniform…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-02 Han Zhong , Wei Xiong , Jiyuan Tan , Liwei Wang , Tong Zhang , Zhaoran Wang , Zhuoran Yang

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