Related papers: Span-Based Optimal Sample Complexity for Weakly Co…
We present the first finite time global convergence analysis of policy gradient in the context of infinite horizon average reward Markov decision processes (MDPs). Specifically, we focus on ergodic tabular MDPs with finite state and action…
In this paper, we study a mean-variance optimization problem in an infinite horizon discrete time discounted Markov decision process (MDP). The objective is to minimize the variance of system rewards with the constraint of mean performance.…
While there is an extensive body of research on the analysis of Value Iteration (VI) for discounted cumulative-reward MDPs, prior work on analyzing VI for (undiscounted) average-reward MDPs has been limited, and most prior results focus on…
We study the problem of PAC learning $\gamma$-margin halfspaces with Random Classification Noise. We establish an information-computation tradeoff suggesting an inherent gap between the sample complexity of the problem and the sample…
We develop several new algorithms for learning Markov Decision Processes in an infinite-horizon average-reward setting with linear function approximation. Using the optimism principle and assuming that the MDP has a linear structure, we…
We study the reward-free reinforcement learning framework, which is particularly suitable for batch reinforcement learning and scenarios where one needs policies for multiple reward functions. This framework has two phases. In the…
For the problem of task-agnostic reinforcement learning (RL), an agent first collects samples from an unknown environment without the supervision of reward signals, then is revealed with a reward and is asked to compute a corresponding…
We study the minimax sample complexity of multicalibration in the batch setting. A learner observes $n$ i.i.d. samples from an unknown distribution and must output a (possibly randomized) predictor whose population multicalibration error,…
Offline reinforcement learning aims to learn from pre-collected datasets without active exploration. This problem faces significant challenges, including limited data availability and distributional shifts. Existing approaches adopt a…
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…
Constrained decision-making is essential for designing safe policies in real-world control systems, yet simulated environments often fail to capture real-world adversities. We consider the problem of learning a policy that will maximize the…
We consider a constrained Markov Decision Problem (CMDP) where the goal of an agent is to maximize the expected discounted sum of rewards over an infinite horizon while ensuring that the expected discounted sum of costs exceeds a certain…
We adapt recent tools developed for the analysis of Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) in non-convex optimization to obtain convergence and sample complexity guarantees for the vanilla policy gradient (PG). Our only assumptions are that the…
We analyze the oracle complexity of the stochastic Halpern iteration with minibatch, where we aim to approximate fixed-points of nonexpansive and contractive operators in a normed finite-dimensional space. We show that if the underlying…
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…
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…
We consider the gap-dependent regret bounds for episodic MDPs. We show that the Monotonic Value Propagation (MVP) algorithm achieves a variance-aware gap-dependent regret bound of $$\tilde{O}\left(\left(\sum_{\Delta_h(s,a)>0} \frac{H^2 \log…
Multi-distribution learning (MDL), which seeks to learn a shared model that minimizes the worst-case risk across $k$ distinct data distributions, has emerged as a unified framework in response to the evolving demand for robustness,…
Policy optimization methods are powerful algorithms in Reinforcement Learning (RL) for their flexibility to deal with policy parameterization and ability to handle model misspecification. However, these methods usually suffer from slow…
We present a framework to address a class of sequential decision making problems. Our framework features learning the optimal control policy with robustness to noisy data, determining the unknown state and action parameters, and performing…