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Modern tasks in reinforcement learning have large state and action spaces. To deal with them efficiently, one often uses predefined feature mapping to represent states and actions in a low-dimensional space. In this paper, we study…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-24 Dongruo Zhou , Jiafan He , Quanquan Gu

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

Recursion is the fundamental paradigm to finitely describe potentially infinite objects. As state-of-the-art reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms cannot directly reason about recursion, they must rely on the practitioner's ingenuity in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-24 Ernst Moritz Hahn , Mateo Perez , Sven Schewe , Fabio Somenzi , Ashutosh Trivedi , Dominik Wojtczak

Deep reinforcement learning has achieved impressive successes yet often requires a very large amount of interaction data. This result is perhaps unsurprising, as using complicated function approximation often requires more data to fit, and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-20 Jonathan N. Lee , Aldo Pacchiano , Vidya Muthukumar , Weihao Kong , Emma Brunskill

We study the reinforcement learning (RL) problem in a constrained Markov decision process (CMDP), where an agent explores the environment to maximize the expected cumulative reward while satisfying a single constraint on the expected total…

We consider large-scale Markov decision processes (MDPs) with a risk measure of variability in cost, under the risk-aware MDPs paradigm. Previous studies showed that risk-aware MDPs, based on a minimax approach to handling risk, can be…

Systems and Control · Computer Science 2017-05-17 Pengqian Yu , William B. Haskell , Huan Xu

Reinforcement learning generalizes multi-armed bandit problems with additional difficulties of a longer planning horizon and unknown transition kernel. We explore a black-box reduction from discounted infinite-horizon tabular reinforcement…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-12 Ian A. Kash , Lev Reyzin , Zishun Yu

We propose an epoch-based reinforcement learning algorithm for infinite-horizon average-cost Markov decision processes (MDPs) that leverages a partial order over a policy class. In this structure, $\pi' \leq \pi$ if data collected under…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-08-07 Zhongjun Zhang , Shipra Agrawal , Ilan Lobel , Sean R. Sinclair , Christina Lee Yu

Asynchronous stochastic approximations (SAs) are an important class of model-free algorithms, tools and techniques that are popular in multi-agent and distributed control scenarios. To counter Bellman's curse of dimensionality, such…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-05-03 Arunselvan Ramaswamy , Shalabh Bhatnagar , Daniel E. Quevedo

Canonical models of Markov decision processes (MDPs) usually consider geometric discounting based on a constant discount factor. While this standard modeling approach has led to many elegant results, some recent studies indicate the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-07-21 Jiarui Gan , Annika Hennes , Rupak Majumdar , Debmalya Mandal , Goran Radanovic

We propose a method of approximating multivariate Gaussian probabilities using dynamic programming. We show that solving the optimization problem associated with a class of discrete-time finite horizon Markov decision processes with…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2018-02-08 Morgan Jones , Matthew M. Peet

In this chapter, we introduce the relaxed inertial proximal splitting algorithm (RIPSA) for hierarchical equilibrium problems. Using Opial-Passty's lemma, we first establish weak ergodic and weak convergence of the sequence generated by the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-09-30 Zakaria Mazgouri , Hassan Riahi , Michel Théra

The convergence of deterministic policy gradient under the Hadamard parameterization is studied in the tabular setting and the linear convergence of the algorithm is established. To this end, we first show that the error decreases at an…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-11-28 Jiacai Liu , Jinchi Chen , Ke Wei

We study the infinite-horizon average-reward reinforcement learning (RL) for continuous space Lipschitz MDPs in which an agent can play policies from a given set $\Phi$. The proposed algorithms efficiently explore the policy space by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-18 Avik Kar , Rahul Singh

We study reinforcement learning (RL) with linear function approximation in Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) satisfying \emph{linear Bellman completeness} -- a fundamental setting where the Bellman backup of any linear value function remains…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-25 Zakaria Mhammedi , Alexander Rakhlin , Nneka Okolo

We present for the first time an asymptotic convergence analysis of two time-scale stochastic approximation driven by "controlled" Markov noise. In particular, the faster and slower recursions have non-additive controlled Markov noise…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-03 Prasenjit Karmakar

We consider a constrained Markov Decision Problem (CMDP) where the goal of an agent is to maximize the expected discounted sum of rewards over an infinite horizon while ensuring that the expected discounted sum of costs exceeds a certain…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-01 Washim Uddin Mondal , Vaneet Aggarwal

We present a new algorithm based on posterior sampling for learning in Constrained Markov Decision Processes (CMDP) in the infinite-horizon undiscounted setting. The algorithm achieves near-optimal regret bounds while being advantageous…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-30 Danil Provodin , Maurits Kaptein , Mykola Pechenizkiy

Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms are known to suffer from the curse of dimensionality, which refers to the fact that large-scale problems often lead to exponentially high sample complexity. A common solution is to use deep neural…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-13 Chenbei Lu , Laixi Shi , Zaiwei Chen , Chenye Wu , Adam Wierman

Distributionally robust reinforcement learning (DRRL) focuses on designing policies that achieve good performance under model uncertainties. The goal is to maximize the worst-case long-term discounted reward, where the data for RL comes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Saptarshi Mandal , Yashaswini Murthy , R. Srikant