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In this paper, we consider a modified version of the control problem in a model free Markov decision process (MDP) setting with large state and action spaces. The control problem most commonly addressed in the contemporary literature is to…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-02-01 Ajin George Joseph , Shalabh Bhatnagar

Markov decision processes (MDP) are a well-established model for sequential decision-making in the presence of probabilities. In robust MDP (RMDP), every action is associated with an uncertainty set of probability distributions, modelling…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-12-16 Tobias Meggendorfer , Maximilian Weininger , Patrick Wienhöft

We study the problem of zero-delay coding for the transmission of a Markov source over a noisy channel with feedback and present a reinforcement learning solution which is guaranteed to achieve near-optimality. To this end, we formulate the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-10-07 Liam Cregg , Fady Alajaji , Serdar Yuksel

A standard assumption in Reinforcement Learning is that the agent observes every visited state-action pair in the associated Markov Decision Process (MDP), along with the per-step rewards. Strong theoretical results are known in this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Zhengjia Zhuo , Anupam Gupta , Viswanath Nagarajan

Constrained Markov Decision Processes are a class of stochastic decision problems in which the decision maker must select a policy that satisfies auxiliary cost constraints. This paper extends upper confidence reinforcement learning for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-28 Liyuan Zheng , Lillian J. Ratliff

We consider Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) where the rewards are unknown and may change in an adversarial manner. We provide an algorithm that achieves state-of-the-art regret bound of $O( \sqrt{\tau (\ln|S|+\ln|A|)T}\ln(T))$, where $S$…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-28 Adrian Rivera Cardoso , He Wang , Huan Xu

We study the setting of \emph{performative reinforcement learning} where the deployed policy affects both the reward, and the transition of the underlying Markov decision process. Prior work~\parencite{MTR23} has addressed this problem…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-18 Debmalya Mandal , Goran Radanovic

We present a general framework for applying machine-learning algorithms to the verification of Markov decision processes (MDPs). The primary goal of these techniques is to improve performance by avoiding an exhaustive exploration of the…

Shifting from traditional control strategies to Deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) for legged robots poses inherent challenges, especially when addressing real-world physical constraints during training. While high-fidelity simulations…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-09-28 Joonho Lee , Lukas Schroth , Victor Klemm , Marko Bjelonic , Alexander Reske , Marco Hutter

In this paper, we study the non-asymptotic and asymptotic performances of the optimal robust policy and value function of robust Markov Decision Processes(MDPs), where the optimal robust policy and value function are solved only from a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-08-16 Wenhao Yang , Liangyu Zhang , Zhihua Zhang

The problem of reinforcement learning in an unknown and discrete Markov Decision Process (MDP) under the average-reward criterion is considered, when the learner interacts with the system in a single stream of observations, starting from an…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-03-06 Mohammad Sadegh Talebi , Odalric-Ambrym Maillard

We study the problem of infinite-horizon average-reward reinforcement learning with linear Markov decision processes (MDPs). The associated Bellman operator of the problem not being a contraction makes the algorithm design challenging.…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-03-12 Kihyuk Hong , Woojin Chae , Yufan Zhang , Dabeen Lee , Ambuj Tewari

While most approaches to the problem of Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) focus on estimating a reward function that best explains an expert agent's policy or demonstrated behavior on a control task, it is often the case that such…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-05-01 Dexter R. R. Scobee , S. Shankar Sastry

In probably approximately correct (PAC) reinforcement learning (RL), an agent is required to identify an $\epsilon$-optimal policy with probability $1-\delta$. While minimax optimal algorithms exist for this problem, its instance-dependent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-25 Andrea Tirinzoni , Aymen Al-Marjani , Emilie Kaufmann

We study the optimal sample complexity in large-scale Reinforcement Learning (RL) problems with policy space generalization, i.e. the agent has a prior knowledge that the optimal policy lies in a known policy space. Existing results show…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-18 Wenlong Mou , Zheng Wen , Xi Chen

Consumption Markov Decision Processes (CMDPs) are probabilistic decision-making models of resource-constrained systems. In a CMDP, the controller possesses a certain amount of a critical resource, such as electric power. Each action of the…

Formal Languages and Automata Theory · Computer Science 2020-05-18 František Blahoudek , Tomáš Brázdil , Petr Novotný , Melkior Ornik , Pranay Thangeda , Ufuk Topcu

Online reinforcement learning in infinite-horizon Markov decision processes (MDPs) remains less theoretically and algorithmically developed than its episodic counterpart, with many algorithms suffering from high ``burn-in'' costs and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-26 Guy Zamir , Matthew Zurek , Yudong Chen

We introduce \texttt{OPO-CMDP}, the first policy optimization algorithm for stochastic Contextual Markov Decision Process (CMDPs) under general offline function approximation. Our approach achieves a high probability regret bound of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Orin Levy , Aviv Rosenberg , Alon Cohen , Yishay Mansour

In this paper, we propose new problem-independent lower bounds on the sample complexity and regret in episodic MDPs, with a particular focus on the non-stationary case in which the transition kernel is allowed to change in each stage of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-09 Omar Darwiche Domingues , Pierre Ménard , Emilie Kaufmann , Michal Valko

This paper investigates model robustness in reinforcement learning (RL) to reduce the sim-to-real gap in practice. We adopt the framework of distributionally robust Markov decision processes (RMDPs), aimed at learning a policy that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-09 Laixi Shi , Gen Li , Yuting Wei , Yuxin Chen , Matthieu Geist , Yuejie Chi