English
Related papers

Related papers: Learning General Parameterized Policies for Infini…

200 papers

This paper proposes a computationally tractable algorithm for learning infinite-horizon average-reward linear mixture Markov decision processes (MDPs) under the Bellman optimality condition. Our algorithm for linear mixture MDPs achieves a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-22 Woojin Chae , Kihyuk Hong , Yufan Zhang , Ambuj Tewari , Dabeen Lee

We tackle average-reward infinite-horizon POMDPs with an unknown transition model but a known observation model, a setting that has been previously addressed in two limiting ways: (i) frequentist methods relying on suboptimal stochastic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-09 Alessio Russo , Alberto Maria Metelli , Marcello Restelli

We study a primal-dual (PD) reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm for online constrained Markov decision processes (CMDPs). Despite its widespread practical use, the existing theoretical literature on PD-RL algorithms for this problem only…

Solving Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs) is hard. Learning optimal controllers for POMDPs when the model is unknown is harder. Online learning of optimal controllers for unknown POMDPs, which requires efficient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-16 Mehdi Jafarnia-Jahromi , Rahul Jain , Ashutosh Nayyar

We study online learning in constrained Markov decision processes (CMDPs) in which rewards and constraints may be either stochastic or adversarial. In such settings, Stradi et al.(2024) proposed the first best-of-both-worlds algorithm able…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-10 Francesco Emanuele Stradi , Anna Lunghi , Matteo Castiglioni , Alberto Marchesi , Nicola Gatti

We address the issue of safety in reinforcement learning. We pose the problem in an episodic framework of a constrained Markov decision process. Existing results have shown that it is possible to achieve a reward regret of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-26 Tao Liu , Ruida Zhou , Dileep Kalathil , P. R. Kumar , Chao Tian

The problem of constrained Markov decision process (CMDP) is investigated, where an agent aims to maximize the expected accumulated discounted reward subject to multiple constraints on its utilities/costs. A new primal-dual approach is…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-10-22 Tianjiao Li , Ziwei Guan , Shaofeng Zou , Tengyu Xu , Yingbin Liang , Guanghui Lan

Many policy-based reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms can be viewed as instantiations of approximate policy iteration (PI), i.e., where policy improvement and policy evaluation are both performed approximately. In applications where the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-29 Yashaswini Murthy , Mehrdad Moharrami , R. Srikant

We study the problem of reinforcement learning in infinite-horizon discounted linear Markov decision processes (MDPs), and propose the first computationally efficient algorithm achieving rate-optimal regret guarantees in this setting. Our…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-16 Antoine Moulin , Gergely Neu , Luca Viano

Safety is a fundamental challenge in reinforcement learning (RL), particularly in real-world applications such as autonomous driving, robotics, and healthcare. To address this, Constrained Markov Decision Processes (CMDPs) are commonly used…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-18 Chang Liu , Yunfan Li , Lin F. Yang

In this paper, we investigate the concentration properties of cumulative reward in Markov Decision Processes (MDPs), focusing on both asymptotic and non-asymptotic settings. We introduce a unified approach to characterize reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-04 Borna Sayedana , Peter E. Caines , Aditya Mahajan

We study the sequential decision making problem of maximizing the expected total reward while satisfying a constraint on the expected total utility. We employ the natural policy gradient method to solve the discounted infinite-horizon…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-10-16 Dongsheng Ding , Kaiqing Zhang , Jiali Duan , Tamer Başar , Mihailo R. Jovanović

Reinforcement Learning (RL) serves as a versatile framework for sequential decision-making, finding applications across diverse domains such as robotics, autonomous driving, recommendation systems, supply chain optimization, biology,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-26 Vaneet Aggarwal , Washim Uddin Mondal , Qinbo Bai

In recent years, significant attention has been directed towards learning average-reward Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). However, existing algorithms either suffer from sub-optimal regret guarantees or computational inefficiencies. In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-04 Victor Boone , Zihan Zhang

Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning (HRL) approaches have shown successful results in solving a large variety of complex, structured, long-horizon problems. Nevertheless, a full theoretical understanding of this empirical evidence is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-05 Gianluca Drappo , Alberto Maria Metelli , Marcello Restelli

In this work, we study algorithms for learning in infinite-horizon undiscounted Markov decision processes (MDPs) with function approximation. We first show that the regret analysis of the Politex algorithm (a version of regularized policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-26 Nevena Lazic , Dong Yin , Yasin Abbasi-Yadkori , Csaba Szepesvari

In many operations management problems, we need to make decisions sequentially to minimize the cost while satisfying certain constraints. One modeling approach to study such problems is constrained Markov decision process (CMDP). When…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-01-27 Yi Chen , Jing Dong , Zhaoran Wang

Reinforcement learning is widely used in applications where one needs to perform sequential decisions while interacting with the environment. The problem becomes more challenging when the decision requirement includes satisfying some safety…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-15 Qinbo Bai , Amrit Singh Bedi , Mridul Agarwal , Alec Koppel , Vaneet Aggarwal

This note re-visits the rolling-horizon control approach to the problem of a Markov decision process (MDP) with infinite-horizon discounted expected reward criterion. Distinguished from the classical value-iteration approach, we develop an…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-06-07 Hyeong Soo Chang

This paper develops a viable notion of learning for sampling-based algorithms that applies in broader settings than previously considered. More specifically, we model a discounted infinite-horizon MDPs with Borel state and action spaces,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-04-09 Daniel Adelman , Cagla Keceli , Alba V. Olivares-Nadal