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To overcome the curse of dimensionality and curse of modeling in Dynamic Programming (DP) methods for solving classical Markov Decision Process (MDP) problems, Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms are popular. In this paper, we consider…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-11-29 Arghyadip Roy , Vivek Borkar , Abhay Karandikar , Prasanna Chaporkar

We study the $(\varepsilon, \delta)$-PAC policy identification problem in finite-horizon episodic Markov Decision Processes. Existing approaches provide finite-time guarantees for approximate settings ($\varepsilon>0$) but suffer from high…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-06 Cyrille Kone , Kevin Jamieson

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 study reward-free reinforcement learning (RL) with linear function approximation, where the agent works in two phases: (1) in the exploration phase, the agent interacts with the environment but cannot access the reward; and (2) in the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-15 Junkai Zhang , Weitong Zhang , Quanquan Gu

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) aims at learning an optimal strategy using a pre-collected dataset without further interactions with the environment. While various algorithms have been proposed for offline RL in the previous literature,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-02 Wei Xiong , Han Zhong , Chengshuai Shi , Cong Shen , Liwei Wang , Tong Zhang

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) aims to find an optimal policy for Markov decision processes (MDPs) using a pre-collected dataset. In this work, we revisit the linear programming (LP) reformulation of Markov decision processes for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-11 Asuman Ozdaglar , Sarath Pattathil , Jiawei Zhang , Kaiqing Zhang

We propose an algorithmic framework, Offline Estimation to Decisions (OE2D), that reduces contextual bandit learning with general reward function approximation to offline regression. The framework allows near-optimal regret for contextual…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-11 Hao Qin , Chicheng Zhang

Within the framework of probably approximately correct Markov decision processes (PAC-MDP), much theoretical work has focused on methods to attain near optimality after a relatively long period of learning and exploration. However,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2016-04-06 Kenji Kawaguchi

Multi-objective optimization models that encode ordered sequential constraints provide a solution to model various challenging problems including encoding preferences, modeling a curriculum, and enforcing measures of safety. A recently…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-09-16 Kyle Hollins Wray , Stas Tiomkin , Mykel J. Kochenderfer , Pieter Abbeel

Constrained Markov Decision Processes (CMDPs) formalize sequential decision-making problems whose objective is to minimize a cost function while satisfying constraints on various cost functions. In this paper, we consider the setting of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-09-25 Krishna C. Kalagarla , Rahul Jain , Pierluigi Nuzzo

Model-based offline reinforcement learning (RL) has made remarkable progress, offering a promising avenue for improving generalization with synthetic model rollouts. Existing works primarily focus on incorporating pessimism for policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-12 Yuanzhao Zhai , Yiying Li , Zijian Gao , Xudong Gong , Kele Xu , Dawei Feng , Ding Bo , Huaimin Wang

Recent theoretical work studies sample-efficient reinforcement learning (RL) extensively in two settings: learning interactively in the environment (online RL), or learning from an offline dataset (offline RL). However, existing algorithms…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-14 Tengyang Xie , Nan Jiang , Huan Wang , Caiming Xiong , Yu Bai

Deploying reinforcement learning policies in the real world requires adapting to time-varying environments. We study this problem in the contextual Markov Decision Process (cMDP) framework, where a family of environments is indexed by a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-04 Param Budhraja , Aditya Gangrade , Alex Olshevsky , Venkatesh Saligrama

Continuous-time Markov decision processes (CTMDPs) are canonical models to express sequential decision-making under dense-time and stochastic environments. When the stochastic evolution of the environment is only available via sampling,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-17 Amin Falah , Shibashis Guha , Ashutosh Trivedi

We study how to efficiently combine formal methods, Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS), and deep learning in order to produce high-quality receding horizon policies in large Markov Decision processes (MDPs). In particular, we use model-checking…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-08-16 Debraj Chakraborty , Damien Busatto-Gaston , Jean-François Raskin , Guillermo A. Pérez

Sequential incentive marketing is an important approach for online businesses to acquire customers, increase loyalty and boost sales. How to effectively allocate the incentives so as to maximize the return (e.g., business objectives) under…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-03-03 Shuai Xiao , Le Guo , Zaifan Jiang , Lei Lv , Yuanbo Chen , Jun Zhu , Shuang Yang

We introduce Dynamic Contextual Markov Decision Processes (DCMDPs), a novel reinforcement learning framework for history-dependent environments that generalizes the contextual MDP framework to handle non-Markov environments, where contexts…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-19 Guy Tennenholtz , Nadav Merlis , Lior Shani , Martin Mladenov , Craig Boutilier

We study online learning in constrained Markov decision processes (CMDPs) with adversarial losses and stochastic hard constraints, under bandit feedback. We consider three scenarios. In the first one, we address general CMDPs, where we…

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

To overcome the curses of dimensionality and modeling of Dynamic Programming (DP) methods to solve Markov Decision Process (MDP) problems, Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods are adopted in practice. Contrary to traditional RL algorithms…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-08-24 Arghyadip Roy , Vivek Borkar , Abhay Karandikar , Prasanna Chaporkar

Safe exploration is crucial for the real-world application of reinforcement learning (RL). Previous works consider the safe exploration problem as Constrained Markov Decision Process (CMDP), where the policies are being optimized under…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-12 Hao Sun , Ziping Xu , Meng Fang , Zhenghao Peng , Jiadong Guo , Bo Dai , Bolei Zhou