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State-of-the-art efficient model-based Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms typically act by iteratively solving empirical models, i.e., by performing \emph{full-planning} on Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) built by the gathered…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-01 Yonathan Efroni , Nadav Merlis , Mohammad Ghavamzadeh , Shie Mannor

This work studies offline Reinforcement Learning (RL) in a class of non-Markovian environments called Regular Decision Processes (RDPs). In RDPs, the unknown dependency of future observations and rewards from the past interactions can be…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-05 Ahana Deb , Roberto Cipollone , Anders Jonsson , Alessandro Ronca , Mohammad Sadegh Talebi

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

Off-dynamics reinforcement learning (RL), where training and deployment transition dynamics are different, can be formulated as learning in a robust Markov decision process (RMDP) where uncertainties in transition dynamics are imposed.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-10 Yiting He , Zhishuai Liu , Weixin Wang , Pan Xu

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

Online reinforcement learning (RL) has been widely applied in information processing scenarios, which usually exhibit much uncertainty due to the intrinsic randomness of channels and service demands. In this paper, we consider an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-17 Rongpeng Li

Offline (or batch) reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms seek to learn an optimal policy from a fixed dataset without active data collection. Based on the composition of the offline dataset, two main categories of methods are used:…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-04 Paria Rashidinejad , Banghua Zhu , Cong Ma , Jiantao Jiao , Stuart Russell

Optimization problems characterized by both discrete and continuous variables are common across various disciplines, presenting unique challenges due to their complex solution landscapes and the difficulty of navigating mixed-variable…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-06-03 Haoyan Zhai , Qianli Hu , Jiangning Chen

Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning (HRL) approaches have shown successful results in solving a large variety of complex, structured, long-horizon problems. Nevertheless, a full theoretical understanding of this empirical evidence is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-05 Gianluca Drappo , Alberto Maria Metelli , Marcello Restelli

We present a reduction from reinforcement learning (RL) to no-regret online learning based on the saddle-point formulation of RL, by which "any" online algorithm with sublinear regret can generate policies with provable performance…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-03 Ching-An Cheng , Remi Tachet des Combes , Byron Boots , Geoff Gordon

We study a primal-dual (PD) reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm for online constrained Markov decision processes (CMDPs). Despite its widespread practical use, the existing theoretical literature on PD-RL algorithms for this problem only…

The inverse reinforcement learning approach to imitation learning is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it can enable learning from a smaller number of expert demonstrations with more robustness to error compounding than behavioral…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-06 Juntao Ren , Gokul Swamy , Zhiwei Steven Wu , J. Andrew Bagnell , Sanjiban Choudhury

We investigate the hardness of online reinforcement learning in fixed horizon, sparse linear Markov decision process (MDP), with a special focus on the high-dimensional regime where the ambient dimension is larger than the number of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-11 Botao Hao , Tor Lattimore , Csaba Szepesvári , Mengdi Wang

The theory of reinforcement learning has focused on two fundamental problems: achieving low regret, and identifying $\epsilon$-optimal policies. While a simple reduction allows one to apply a low-regret algorithm to obtain an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-23 Andrew Wagenmaker , Max Simchowitz , Kevin Jamieson

Motivated by the wide adoption of reinforcement learning (RL) in real-world personalized services, where users' sensitive and private information needs to be protected, we study regret minimization in finite-horizon Markov decision…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-22 Xingyu Zhou

Strong worst-case performance bounds for episodic reinforcement learning exist but fortunately in practice RL algorithms perform much better than such bounds would predict. Algorithms and theory that provide strong problem-dependent bounds…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-05 Andrea Zanette , Emma Brunskill

This article reviews the recent advances on the statistical foundation of reinforcement learning (RL) in the offline and low-adaptive settings. We will start by arguing why offline RL is the appropriate model for almost any real-life ML…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-07 Ming Yin , Mengdi Wang , Yu-Xiang Wang

Recent studies have shown that episodic reinforcement learning (RL) is no harder than bandits when the total reward is bounded by $1$, and proved regret bounds that have a polylogarithmic dependence on the planning horizon $H$. However, it…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-16 Kaixuan Ji , Qingyue Zhao , Jiafan He , Weitong Zhang , Quanquan Gu

We study offline reinforcement learning (RL) with linear MDPs under the infinite-horizon discounted setting which aims to learn a policy that maximizes the expected discounted cumulative reward using a pre-collected dataset. Existing…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-06-04 Kihyuk Hong , Ambuj Tewari

In many real-world settings, reinforcement learning systems suffer performance degradation when the environment encountered at deployment differs from that observed during training. Distributionally robust reinforcement learning (DR-RL)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-05 Debamita Ghosh , George K. Atia , Yue Wang