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We study the policy evaluation problem in multi-agent reinforcement learning. In this problem, a group of agents works cooperatively to evaluate the value function for the global discounted accumulative reward problem, which is composed of…
We study a new two-time-scale stochastic gradient method for solving optimization problems, where the gradients are computed with the aid of an auxiliary variable under samples generated by time-varying MDPs controlled by the underlying…
We investigate reinforcement learning in the setting of Markov decision processes for a large number of exchangeable agents interacting in a mean field manner. Applications include, for example, the control of a large number of robots…
In this paper we extend temporal difference policy evaluation algorithms to performance criteria that include the variance of the cumulative reward. Such criteria are useful for risk management, and are important in domains such as finance…
Multi-period mean-variance optimization is a long-standing problem, caused by the failure of dynamic programming principle. This paper studies the mean-variance optimization in a setting of finite-horizon discrete-time Markov decision…
We propose and study a general framework for regularized Markov decision processes (MDPs) where the goal is to find an optimal policy that maximizes the expected discounted total reward plus a policy regularization term. The extant…
Markov Decision Processes are classically solved using Value Iteration and Policy Iteration algorithms. Recent interest in Reinforcement Learning has motivated the study of methods inspired by optimization, such as gradient ascent. Among…
We study infinite-horizon average-reward constrained Markov decision processes (CMDPs) under the unichain assumption and general policy parameterizations. Existing regret analyses for constrained reinforcement learning largely rely on…
We consider the estimation of the policy gradient in partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDP) with a special class of structured policies that are finite-state controllers. We show that the gradient estimation can be done in…
We study risk-sensitive RL where the goal is learn a history-dependent policy that optimizes some risk measure of cumulative rewards. We consider a family of risks called the optimized certainty equivalents (OCE), which captures important…
This paper is concerned with the problem of policy evaluation with linear function approximation in discounted infinite horizon Markov decision processes. We investigate the sample complexities required to guarantee a predefined estimation…
Actor-critic style two-time-scale algorithms are one of the most popular methods in reinforcement learning, and have seen great empirical success. However, their performance is not completely understood theoretically. In this paper, we…
We study a multi-agent reinforcement learning dynamics, and analyze its asymptotic behavior in infinite-horizon discounted Markov potential games. We focus on the independent and decentralized setting, where players do not know the game…
In this paper, we consider the finite-state approximation of a discrete-time constrained Markov decision process (MDP) under the discounted and average cost criteria. Using the linear programming formulation of the constrained discounted…
Actor-critic (AC) methods are widely used in reinforcement learning (RL) and benefit from the flexibility of using any policy gradient method as the actor and value-based method as the critic. The critic is usually trained by minimizing the…
The analysis of Temporal Difference (TD) learning in the average-reward setting faces notable theoretical difficulties because the Bellman operator is not contractive with respect to any norm. This complicates standard analyses of…
We are interested in understanding stability (almost sure boundedness) of stochastic approximation algorithms (SAs) driven by a `controlled Markov' process. Analyzing this class of algorithms is important, since many reinforcement learning…
In this paper we provide faster algorithms for approximately solving discounted Markov Decision Processes in multiple parameter regimes. Given a discounted Markov Decision Process (DMDP) with $|S|$ states, $|A|$ actions, discount factor…
We study reinforcement learning for continuous-time Markov decision processes (MDPs) in the finite-horizon episodic setting. In contrast to discrete-time MDPs, the inter-transition times of a continuous-time MDP are exponentially…
Decision-making under distribution shift is a central challenge in reinforcement learning (RL), where training and deployment environments differ. We study this problem through the lens of robust Markov decision processes (RMDPs), which…