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Related papers: Truly No-Regret Learning in Constrained MDPs

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We consider online learning for minimizing regret in unknown, episodic Markov decision processes (MDPs) with continuous states and actions. We develop variants of the UCRL and posterior sampling algorithms that employ nonparametric Gaussian…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-01-04 Sayak Ray Chowdhury , Aditya Gopalan

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

We consider primal-dual-based reinforcement learning (RL) in episodic constrained Markov decision processes (CMDPs) with non-stationary objectives and constraints, which plays a central role in ensuring the safety of RL in time-varying…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-22 Yuhao Ding , Javad Lavaei

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…

We study safe online reinforcement learning in Constrained Markov Decision Processes (CMDPs) under strong regret and violation metrics, which forbid error cancellation over time. Existing primal-dual methods that achieve sublinear strong…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-04 Qian Zuo , Zhiyong Wang , Fengxiang He

This paper explores the realm of infinite horizon average reward Constrained Markov Decision Processes (CMDPs). To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first to delve into the regret and constraint violation analysis of average…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-31 Qinbo Bai , Washim Uddin Mondal , Vaneet Aggarwal

We consider the reinforcement learning problem for the constrained Markov decision process (CMDP), which plays a central role in satisfying safety or resource constraints in sequential learning and decision-making. In this problem, we are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-19 Jiashuo Jiang , Yinyu Ye

This paper presents the first model-free, simulator-free reinforcement learning algorithm for Constrained Markov Decision Processes (CMDPs) with sublinear regret and zero constraint violation. The algorithm is named Triple-Q because it…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-26 Honghao Wei , Xin Liu , Lei Ying

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 2023-09-28 Danil Provodin , Pratik Gajane , Mykola Pechenizkiy , Maurits Kaptein

Model-free reinforcement learning is known to be memory and computation efficient and more amendable to large scale problems. In this paper, two model-free algorithms are introduced for learning infinite-horizon average-reward Markov…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-26 Chen-Yu Wei , Mehdi Jafarnia-Jahromi , Haipeng Luo , Hiteshi Sharma , Rahul Jain

In this work, we consider the regret minimization problem for reinforcement learning in latent Markov Decision Processes (LMDP). In an LMDP, an MDP is randomly drawn from a set of $M$ possible MDPs at the beginning of the interaction, but…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-10 Jeongyeol Kwon , Yonathan Efroni , Constantine Caramanis , Shie Mannor

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

We propose novel classical and quantum online algorithms for learning finite-horizon and infinite-horizon average-reward Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). Our algorithms are based on a hybrid exploration-generative reinforcement learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-12 Andris Ambainis , Joao F. Doriguello , Debbie Lim

This paper considers the best policy identification (BPI) problem in online Constrained Markov Decision Processes (CMDPs). We are interested in algorithms that are model-free, have low regret, and identify an approximately optimal policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-16 Zihan Zhou , Honghao Wei , Lei Ying

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

As an important framework for safe Reinforcement Learning, the Constrained Markov Decision Process (CMDP) has been extensively studied in the recent literature. However, despite the rich results under various on-policy learning settings,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-14 Fan Chen , Junyu Zhang , Zaiwen Wen

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

The Adversarial Markov Decision Process (AMDP) is a learning framework that deals with unknown and varying tasks in decision-making applications like robotics and recommendation systems. A major limitation of the AMDP formalism, however, is…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-05-06 Sang Bin Moon , Abolfazl Hashemi

We consider learning in an adversarial Markov Decision Process (MDP) where the loss functions can change arbitrarily over $K$ episodes and the state space can be arbitrarily large. We assume that the Q-function of any policy is linear in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-05 Yan Dai , Haipeng Luo , Chen-Yu Wei , Julian Zimmert

This paper studies constrained Markov decision processes (CMDPs) with constraints against stochastic thresholds, aiming at safety of reinforcement learning in unknown and uncertain environments. We leverage a Growing-Window estimator…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-25 Qian Zuo , Fengxiang He