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We study online learning in two-player uninformed Markov games, where the opponent's actions and policies are unobserved. In this setting, Tian et al. (2021) show that achieving no-external-regret is impossible without incurring an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Junyan Liu , Haipeng Luo , Zihan Zhang , Lillian J. Ratliff

We study regret minimization under privacy constraints in episodic inhomogeneous linear Markov Decision Processes (MDPs), motivated by the growing use of reinforcement learning (RL) in personalized decision-making systems that rely on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-29 Sharan Sahu

We consider a linear stochastic bandit problem involving $M$ agents that can collaborate via a central server to minimize regret. A fraction $\alpha$ of these agents are adversarial and can act arbitrarily, leading to the following tension:…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-08 Aritra Mitra , Arman Adibi , George J. Pappas , Hamed Hassani

This note re-visits the rolling-horizon control approach to the problem of a Markov decision process (MDP) with infinite-horizon discounted expected reward criterion. Distinguished from the classical value-iteration approach, we develop an…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-06-07 Hyeong Soo Chang

We consider the problem of finding the best memoryless stochastic policy for an infinite-horizon partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP) with finite state and action spaces with respect to either the discounted or mean reward…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-05-02 Johannes Müller , Guido Montúfar

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

We study offline-online reinforcement learning in linear mixture Markov decision processes (MDPs) under environment shift. In the offline phase, data are collected by an unknown behavior policy and may come from a mismatched environment,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-15 Zhongjun Zhang , Sean R. Sinclair

While a large body of empirical results show that temporally-extended actions and options may significantly affect the learning performance of an agent, the theoretical understanding of how and when options can be beneficial in online…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-04-18 Ronan Fruit , Alessandro Lazaric

A Tree Markov Decision Problem (T-MDP) is a finite-horizon MDP with a starting state $s_{1}$, in which every state is reachable from $s_{1}$ through exactly one state-action trajectory. T-MDPs arise naturally as abstractions of decision…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-07 Anvay Shah , Ramsundar Anandanarayanan , Sharayu Moharir , Shivaram Kalyanakrishnan

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 define the problem of linear Contextual Stochastic Shortest Path (CSSP), where at the beginning of each episode, the learner observes an adversarially chosen context that determines the MDP through a fixed but unknown linear function.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-18 Dor Polikar , Alon Cohen

We study reinforcement learning in non-episodic factored Markov decision processes (FMDPs). We propose two near-optimal and oracle-efficient algorithms for FMDPs. Assuming oracle access to an FMDP planner, they enjoy a Bayesian and a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-06-09 Ziping Xu , Ambuj Tewari

We study computationally and statistically efficient reinforcement learning under the linear $Q^{\pi}$ realizability assumption, where any policy's $Q$-function is linear in a given state-action feature representation. Prior methods in this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Yijing Ke , Zihan Zhang , Ruosong Wang

We study online learning in unknown Markov games, a problem that arises in episodic multi-agent reinforcement learning where the actions of the opponents are unobservable. We show that in this challenging setting, achieving sublinear regret…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-09 Yi Tian , Yuanhao Wang , Tiancheng Yu , Suvrit Sra

We revisit offline reinforcement learning on episodic time-homogeneous Markov Decision Processes (MDP). For tabular MDP with $S$ states and $A$ actions, or linear MDP with anchor points and feature dimension $d$, given the collected $K$…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-02-11 Tongzheng Ren , Jialian Li , Bo Dai , Simon S. Du , Sujay Sanghavi

We study a novel variant of online finite-horizon Markov Decision Processes with adversarially changing loss functions and initially unknown dynamics. In each episode, the learner suffers the loss accumulated along the trajectory realized…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-02 Alon Cohen , Haim Kaplan , Tomer Koren , Yishay Mansour

For the misspecified linear Markov decision process (MLMDP) model of Jin et al. [2020], we propose an algorithm with three desirable properties. (P1) Its regret after $K$ episodes scales as $K \max \{ \varepsilon_{\text{mis}},…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-02 Daniel Vial , Advait Parulekar , Sanjay Shakkottai , R. Srikant

Recently, several studies (Zhou et al., 2021a; Zhang et al., 2021b; Kim et al., 2021; Zhou and Gu, 2022) have provided variance-dependent regret bounds for linear contextual bandits, which interpolates the regret for the worst-case regime…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-22 Heyang Zhao , Jiafan He , Dongruo Zhou , Tong Zhang , Quanquan Gu

Partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) are a general framework for sequential decision-making under latent state uncertainty, yet learning in POMDPs is intractable in the worst case. Motivated by sensing and probing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-27 Ming Shi , Yingbin Liang , Ness B. Shroff

Partially observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs) are a standard model for agents making decisions in uncertain environments. Most work on POMDPs focuses on synthesizing strategies based on the available capabilities. However, system…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-07-12 Alyzia-Maria Konsta , Alberto Lluch Lafuente , Christoph Matheja