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We study reward-free and reward-agnostic exploration in episodic finite-horizon Markov decision processes (MDPs), where an agent explores an unknown environment without observing external rewards. Reward-free exploration aims to enable…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-18 Oran Ridel , Alon Cohen

We introduce a new closed-loop architecture for the online solution of approximate optimal control problems in the context of continuous-time systems. Specifically, we introduce the first algorithm that incorporates dynamic momentum in…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-04-28 Daniel E. Ochoa , Jorge I. Poveda

This work considers the problem of learning cooperative policies in multi-agent settings with partially observable and non-stationary environments without a communication channel. We focus on improving information sharing between agents and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-03 Eshagh Kargar , Ville Kyrki

For an affine two factor model, we study the asymptotic properties of the maximum likelihood and least squares estimators of some appearing parameters in the so-called subcritical (ergodic) case based on continuous time observations. We…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2014-06-17 Matyas Barczy , Leif Doering , Zenghu Li , Gyula Pap

Many sequential decision-making problems need optimization of different objectives which possibly conflict with each other. The conventional way to deal with a multi-task problem is to establish a scalar objective function based on a linear…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-28 Mohsen Amidzadeh

Processes (MDPs) often require frequent decision making, that is, taking an action every microsecond, second, or minute. Infinite horizon discount reward formulation is still relevant for a large portion of these applications, because…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2014-12-17 Yin-Lam Chow , Junjie Qin

Model-free off-policy actor-critic methods are an efficient solution to complex continuous control tasks. However, these algorithms rely on a number of design tricks and hyperparameters, making their application to new domains difficult and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-26 Jake Grigsby , Jin Yong Yoo , Yanjun Qi

Recent advances have significantly improved our understanding of the sample complexity of learning in average-reward Markov decision processes (AMDPs) under the generative model. However, much less is known about the constrained…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-23 Yukuan Wei , Xudong Li , Lin F. Yang

Off-policy actor-critic algorithms have shown strong potential in deep reinforcement learning for continuous control tasks. Their success primarily comes from leveraging pessimistic state-action value function updates, which reduce function…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-21 Bahareh Tasdighi , Nicklas Werge , Yi-Shan Wu , Melih Kandemir

In this paper, we establish last-iterate convergence rates for off-policy actor--critic methods in reinforcement learning. In particular, under a single-loop, single-timescale implementation and a broad class of policy updates, including…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Ishaq Hamza , Zaiwei Chen

This paper investigates the asymptotic and non-asymptotic behavior of the quantized primal dual algorithm in network utility maximization problems, in which a group of agents maximize the sum of their individual concave objective functions…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2016-04-25 Ehsan Nekouei , Tansu Alpcan , Girish Nair , Robin Evans

We study infinite-horizon average-reward constrained Markov decision processes (CMDPs) under the weakly communicating assumption. Our contributions are twofold. First, we establish strong duality for weakly communicating average-reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Kihyun Yu , Beomhan Baek , Dabeen Lee

In the contextual linear bandit setting, algorithms built on the optimism principle fail to exploit the structure of the problem and have been shown to be asymptotically suboptimal. In this paper, we follow recent approaches of deriving…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-23 Andrea Tirinzoni , Matteo Pirotta , Marcello Restelli , Alessandro Lazaric

Actor-critic methods, a type of model-free reinforcement learning (RL), have achieved state-of-the-art performances in many real-world domains in continuous control. Despite their success, the wide-scale deployment of these models is still…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-14 Srinjoy Roy , Saptam Bakshi , Tamal Maharaj

TD($\lambda$) in value-based MARL algorithms or the Temporal Difference critic learning in Actor-Critic-based (AC-based) algorithms synergistically integrate elements from Monte-Carlo simulation and Q function bootstrapping via dynamic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Yue Deng , Zirui Wang , Yin Zhang

We study safe reinforcement learning in finite-horizon linear mixture constrained Markov decision processes (CMDPs) with adversarial rewards under full-information feedback and an unknown transition kernel. We propose a primal-dual policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Kihyun Yu , Seoungbin Bae , Dabeen Lee

We study online learning in episodic constrained Markov decision processes (CMDPs), where the learner aims at collecting as much reward as possible over the episodes, while satisfying some long-term constraints during the learning process.…

Multi-time-scale stochastic approximation is an iterative algorithm for finding the fixed point of a set of $N$ coupled operators given their noisy samples. It has been observed that due to the coupling between the decision variables and…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-09-13 Sihan Zeng , Thinh T. Doan

In this paper we provide faster algorithms for approximately solving discounted Markov Decision Processes in multiple parameter regimes. Given a discounted Markov Decision Process (DMDP) with $|S|$ states, $|A|$ actions, discount factor…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2020-12-24 Aaron Sidford , Mengdi Wang , Xian Wu , Yinyu Ye

The average reward is a fundamental performance metric in reinforcement learning (RL) focusing on the long-run performance of an agent. Differential temporal difference (TD) learning algorithms are a major advance for average reward RL as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-19 Ethan Blaser , Jiuqi Wang , Shangtong Zhang