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We present the convergence rates of synchronous and asynchronous Q-learning for average-reward Markov decision processes, where the absence of contraction poses a fundamental challenge. Existing non-asymptotic results overcome this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-30 Zijun Chen , Zaiwei Chen , Nian Si , Shengbo Wang

Episodic reinforcement learning and contextual bandits are two widely studied sequential decision-making problems. Episodic reinforcement learning generalizes contextual bandits and is often perceived to be more difficult due to long…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-01 Zihan Zhang , Xiangyang Ji , Simon S. Du

In this paper, we present an online reinforcement learning algorithm for constrained Markov decision processes with a safety constraint. Despite the necessary attention of the scientific community, considering stochastic stopping time, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-26 Abhijit Mazumdar , Rafal Wisniewski , Manuela L. Bujorianu

Reinforcement Learning (RL) and continuous nonlinear control have been successfully deployed in multiple domains of complicated sequential decision-making tasks. However, given the exploration nature of the learning process and the presence…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-08-01 Wenhao Luo , Wen Sun , Ashish Kapoor

Modern reinforcement learning (RL) often faces an enormous state-action space. Existing analytical results are typically for settings with a small number of state-actions, or simple models such as linearly modeled Q-functions. To derive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-03 Sing-Yuan Yeh , Fu-Chieh Chang , Chang-Wei Yueh , Pei-Yuan Wu , Alberto Bernacchia , Sattar Vakili

Reinforcement learning provides a framework for learning to control which actions to take towards completing a task through trial-and-error. In many applications observing interactions is costly, necessitating sample-efficient learning. In…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-11-04 Charles Gadd , Markus Heinonen , Harri Lähdesmäki , Samuel Kaski

We consider reinforcement learning (RL) methods in offline domains without additional online data collection, such as mobile health applications. Most of existing policy optimization algorithms in the computer science literature are…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-07-28 Chengchun Shi , Shikai Luo , Yuan Le , Hongtu Zhu , Rui Song

This paper proposes a reinforcement learning method for controller synthesis of autonomous systems in unknown and partially-observable environments with subjective time-dependent safety constraints. Mathematically, we model the system…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-04-06 Yu Wang , Alper Kamil Bozkurt , Miroslav Pajic

Q-learning, which seeks to learn the optimal Q-function of a Markov decision process (MDP) in a model-free fashion, lies at the heart of reinforcement learning. When it comes to the synchronous setting (such that independent samples for all…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-03-18 Gen Li , Changxiao Cai , Yuxin Chen , Yuting Wei , Yuejie Chi

While Bayesian-based exploration often demonstrates superior empirical performance compared to bonus-based methods in model-based reinforcement learning (RL), its theoretical understanding remains limited for model-free settings. Existing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-05 He Wang , Xingyu Xu , Yuejie Chi

Applications of Reinforcement Learning (RL), in which agents learn to make a sequence of decisions despite lacking complete information about the latent states of the controlled system, that is, they act under partial observability of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-26 Qinghua Liu , Alan Chung , Csaba Szepesvári , Chi Jin

We consider the problem of online reinforcement learning for the Stochastic Shortest Path (SSP) problem modeled as an unknown MDP with an absorbing state. We propose PSRL-SSP, a simple posterior sampling-based reinforcement learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-11 Mehdi Jafarnia-Jahromi , Liyu Chen , Rahul Jain , Haipeng Luo

We study the problem of online learning and online regret minimization when samples are drawn from a general unknown non-stationary process. We introduce the concept of a dynamic changing process with cost $K$, where the conditional…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-14 Changlong Wu , Ananth Grama , Wojciech Szpankowski

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) provides a new way to generate robot control policy. However, the process of training control policy requires lengthy exploration, resulting in a low sample efficiency of reinforcement learning (RL) in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-08 Chao Li

One of the key approaches to save samples in reinforcement learning (RL) is to use knowledge from an approximate model such as its simulator. However, how much does an approximate model help to learn a near-optimal policy of the true…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-15 Fei Feng , Wotao Yin , Lin F. Yang

The field of quickest change detection (QCD) focuses on the design and analysis of online algorithms that estimate the time at which a significant event occurs. In this paper, design and analysis are cast in a Bayesian framework, where QCD…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-12-30 Austin Cooper , Sean Meyn

We consider the optimal sample complexity theory of tabular reinforcement learning (RL) for maximizing the infinite horizon discounted reward in a Markov decision process (MDP). Optimal worst-case complexity results have been developed for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-03 Shengbo Wang , Jose Blanchet , Peter Glynn

Sample efficiency is critical for online Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF). While existing works investigate sample-efficient online exploration strategies, the potential of utilizing misspecified yet relevant reward models…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Jiawei Huang , Bingcong Li , Christoph Dann , Niao He

In this paper we study online Reinforcement Learning (RL) in partially observable dynamical systems. We focus on the Predictive State Representations (PSRs) model, which is an expressive model that captures other well-known models such as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-16 Wenhao Zhan , Masatoshi Uehara , Wen Sun , Jason D. Lee

Offline reinforcement learning seeks to utilize offline (observational) data to guide the learning of (causal) sequential decision making strategies. The hope is that offline reinforcement learning coupled with function approximation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-23 Ruosong Wang , Dean P. Foster , Sham M. Kakade