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The epidemic failure of replicability across empirical science and machine learning has recently motivated the formal study of replicable learning algorithms [Impagliazzo et al. (2022)]. In batch settings where data comes from a fixed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-17 Max Hopkins , Sihan Liu , Christopher Ye , Yuichi Yoshida

Robust Markov decision processes (MDPs) provide a general framework to model decision problems where the system dynamics are changing or only partially known. Efficient methods for some \texttt{sa}-rectangular robust MDPs exist, using its…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-10-06 Navdeep Kumar , Kfir Levy , Kaixin Wang , Shie Mannor

We consider the problem of maximizing the expected average reward obtained over an infinite time horizon by $n$ weakly coupled Markov decision processes. Our setup is a substantial generalization of the multi-armed restless bandit problem…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-01 Diego Goldsztajn , Konstantin Avrachenkov

We study a novel setting in offline reinforcement learning (RL) where a number of distributed machines jointly cooperate to solve the problem but only one single round of communication is allowed and there is a budget constraint on the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-02-11 Juliusz Krysztof Ziomek , Jun Wang , Yaodong Yang

Deterministic Markov Decision Processes (DMDPs) are a mathematical framework for decision-making where the outcomes and future possible actions are deterministically determined by the current action taken. DMDPs can be viewed as a finite…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-06-17 Ali Asadi , Krishnendu Chatterjee , Jakob de Raaij

Dynamic optimization of mean and variance in Markov decision processes (MDPs) is a long-standing challenge caused by the failure of dynamic programming. In this paper, we propose a new approach to find the globally optimal policy for…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-02-28 Li Xia , Shuai Ma

We study the model-based reward-free reinforcement learning with linear function approximation for episodic Markov decision processes (MDPs). In this setting, the agent works in two phases. In the exploration phase, the agent interacts with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-03 Weitong Zhang , Dongruo Zhou , Quanquan Gu

Policy iteration is a family of algorithms that are used to find an optimal policy for a given Markov Decision Problem (MDP). Simple Policy iteration (SPI) is a type of policy iteration where the strategy is to change the policy at exactly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-02 Sarthak Consul , Bhishma Dedhia , Kumar Ashutosh , Parthasarathi Khirwadkar

We consider the problem of solving robust Markov decision process (MDP), which involves a set of discounted, finite state, finite action space MDPs with uncertain transition kernels. The goal of planning is to find a robust policy that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-13 Yan Li , Guanghui Lan , Tuo Zhao

We study the problem of deployment efficient reinforcement learning (RL) with linear function approximation under the \emph{reward-free} exploration setting. This is a well-motivated problem because deploying new policies is costly in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-23 Dan Qiao , Yu-Xiang Wang

While multitask representation learning has become a popular approach in reinforcement learning (RL), theoretical understanding of why and when it works remains limited. This paper presents analyses for the statistical benefit of multitask…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-16 Rui Lu , Gao Huang , Simon S. Du

We consider a reinforcement learning setting in which the deployment environment is different from the training environment. Applying a robust Markov decision processes formulation, we extend the distributionally robust $Q$-learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-02 Shengbo Wang , Nian Si , Jose Blanchet , Zhengyuan Zhou

Policy Iteration (PI) is a classical family of algorithms to compute an optimal policy for any given Markov Decision Problem (MDP). The basic idea in PI is to begin with some initial policy and to repeatedly update the policy to one from an…

Robust Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) are receiving much attention in learning a robust policy which is less sensitive to environment changes. There are an increasing number of works analyzing sample-efficiency of robust MDPs. However,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-09-13 Wenhao Yang , Han Wang , Tadashi Kozuno , Scott M. Jordan , Zhihua Zhang

Monte Carlo Exploring Starts (MCES), which aims to learn the optimal policy using only sample returns, is a simple and natural algorithm in reinforcement learning which has been shown to converge under various conditions. However, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-07 Suei-Wen Chen , Keith Ross , Pierre Youssef

This paper studies an online learning problem that seeks optimal testing policies for a stream of subjects, each of whom can be evaluated through a sequence of candidate tests drawn from a common pool. We refer to this problem as the Online…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-05 Qiyuan Chen , Raed Al Kontar

We study the problem of learning multivariate log-concave densities with respect to a global loss function. We obtain the first upper bound on the sample complexity of the maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) for a log-concave density on…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2018-12-06 Timothy Carpenter , Ilias Diakonikolas , Anastasios Sidiropoulos , Alistair Stewart

Markov decision processes (MDPs) are standard models for probabilistic systems with non-deterministic behaviours. Mean payoff (or long-run average reward) provides a mathematically elegant formalism to express performance related…

Performance · Computer Science 2017-09-08 Jan Křetínský , Tobias Meggendorfer

Markov decision processes (MDPs) are a popular model for performance analysis and optimization of stochastic systems. The parameters of stochastic behavior of MDPs are estimates from empirical observations of a system; their values are not…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-10-26 Dimitri Scheftelowitsch , Peter Buchholz , Vahid Hashemi , Holger Hermanns

We study infinite-horizon average-reward Markov decision processes (AMDPs) in the context of general function approximation. Specifically, we propose a novel algorithmic framework named Local-fitted Optimization with OPtimism (LOOP), which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-22 Jianliang He , Han Zhong , Zhuoran Yang