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Policy learning in modern operations environments faces a fundamental tension between limited operational data and the large, often continuous, state and action spaces over which good decisions must be identified and deployed. We study…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-05-27 Shengbo Wang , Jose Blanchet , Peter Glynn

Inverse reinforcement learning is the problem of inferring a reward function from an optimal policy or demonstrations by an expert. In this work, it is assumed that the reward is expressed as a reward machine whose transitions depend on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-23 Mohamad Louai Shehab , Antoine Aspeel , Necmiye Ozay

We consider the problem of service placement at the network edge, in which a decision maker has to choose between $N$ services to host at the edge to satisfy the demands of customers. Our goal is to design adaptive algorithms to minimize…

Networking and Internet Architecture · Computer Science 2021-01-15 Guojun Xiong , Rahul Singh , Jian Li

We consider the adversarial Markov Decision Process (MDP) problem, where the rewards for the MDP can be adversarially chosen, and the transition function can be either known or unknown. In both settings, Follow-the-PerturbedLeader (FPL)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-24 Yuanhao Wang , Kefan Dong

This paper deals with optimal policy learning (OPL) with observational data, i.e. data-driven optimal decision-making, in multi-action (or multi-arm) settings, where a finite set of decision options is available. It is organized in three…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-04-01 Giovanni Cerulli

Reinforcement learning algorithms are typically designed for generic Markov Decision Processes (MDPs), where any state-action pair can lead to an arbitrary transition distribution. In many practical systems, however, only a subset of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-05 Davide Maran , Davide Salaorni , Marcello Restelli

Constrained Markov Decision Process (CMDP) is a natural framework for reinforcement learning tasks with safety constraints, where agents learn a policy that maximizes the long-term reward while satisfying the constraints on the long-term…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-02-20 Qingkai Liang , Fanyu Que , Eytan Modiano

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

We study the gap-dependent bounds of two important algorithms for on-policy Q-learning for finite-horizon episodic tabular Markov Decision Processes (MDPs): UCB-Advantage (Zhang et al. 2020) and Q-EarlySettled-Advantage (Li et al. 2021).…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-03-11 Zhong Zheng , Haochen Zhang , Lingzhou Xue

We study non-rectangular robust Markov decision processes under the average-reward criterion, where the ambiguity set couples transition probabilities across states and the adversary commits to a stationary kernel for the entire horizon. We…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-03-11 Shengbo Wang , Nian Si

We propose a general framework for entropy-regularized average-reward reinforcement learning in Markov decision processes (MDPs). Our approach is based on extending the linear-programming formulation of policy optimization in MDPs to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-05-23 Gergely Neu , Anders Jonsson , Vicenç Gómez

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a fundamental framework for sequential decision-making, in which an agent learns an optimal policy through interactions with an unknown environment. In settings with function approximation, many existing RL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Ruiquan Huang , Donghao Li , Yingbin Liang , Jing Yang

We study reinforcement learning for continuous-time Markov decision processes (MDPs) in the finite-horizon episodic setting. In contrast to discrete-time MDPs, the inter-transition times of a continuous-time MDP are exponentially…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-04 Xuefeng Gao , Xun Yu Zhou

In this paper, we consider the problem of online learning of Markov decision processes (MDPs) with very large state spaces. Under the assumptions of realizable function approximation and low Bellman ranks, we develop an online learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-23 Kefan Dong , Jian Peng , Yining Wang , Yuan Zhou

Reinforcement learning in non-stationary environments is challenging due to abrupt and unpredictable changes in dynamics, often causing traditional algorithms to fail to converge. However, in many real-world cases, non-stationarity has some…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-25 Mohsen Amiri , Sindri Magnússon

While learning in an unknown Markov Decision Process (MDP), an agent should trade off exploration to discover new information about the MDP, and exploitation of the current knowledge to maximize the reward. Although the agent will…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-16 Evrard Garcelon , Mohammad Ghavamzadeh , Alessandro Lazaric , Matteo Pirotta

Deep reinforcement learning methods have achieved state-of-the-art results in a variety of challenging, high-dimensional domains ranging from video games to locomotion. The key to success has been the use of deep neural networks used to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-17 Hiteshi Sharma , Rahul Jain

Reinforcement learning (RL) agents have traditionally been tasked with maximizing the value function of a Markov decision process (MDP), either in continuous settings, with fixed discount factor $\gamma < 1$, or in episodic settings, with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-02-11 Silviu Pitis

Reinforcement learning methods typically use Deep Neural Networks to approximate the value functions and policies underlying a Markov Decision Process. Unfortunately, DNN-based RL suffers from a lack of explainability of the resulting…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2022-05-19 Shambhuraj Sawant , Sebastien Gros

Online matching problems arise in many complex systems, from cloud services and online marketplaces to organ exchange networks, where timely, principled decisions are critical for maintaining high system performance. Traditional heuristics…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-10-09 Chiara Mignacco , Matthieu Jonckheere , Gilles Stoltz