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Obtaining no-regret guarantees for reinforcement learning (RL) in the case of problems with continuous state and/or action spaces is still one of the major open challenges in the field. Recently, a variety of solutions have been proposed,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-07 Davide Maran , Alberto Maria Metelli , Matteo Papini , Marcello Restell

We study risk-sensitive reinforcement learning in episodic Markov decision processes with unknown transition kernels, where the goal is to optimize the total reward under the risk measure of exponential utility. We propose two provably…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-25 Yingjie Fei , Zhuoran Yang , Yudong Chen , Zhaoran Wang , Qiaomin Xie

The curse of dimensionality renders Reinforcement Learning (RL) impractical in many real-world settings with exponentially large state and action spaces. Yet, many environments exhibit exploitable structure that can accelerate learning. To…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-16 Thomas van Vuren , Fiona Sloothaak , Maarten G. Wolf , Jaron Sanders

Computational results demonstrate that posterior sampling for reinforcement learning (PSRL) dramatically outperforms algorithms driven by optimism, such as UCRL2. We provide insight into the extent of this performance boost and the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-06-14 Ian Osband , Benjamin Van Roy

We propose an automata-theoretic approach for reinforcement learning (RL) under complex spatio-temporal constraints with time windows. The problem is formulated using a Markov decision process under a bounded temporal logic constraint.…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-08-01 Xiaoshan Lin , Abbasali Koochakzadeh , Yasin Yazicioglu , Derya Aksaray

We study risk-sensitive reinforcement learning (RL) based on an entropic risk measure in episodic non-stationary Markov decision processes (MDPs). Both the reward functions and the state transition kernels are unknown and allowed to vary…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-22 Yuhao Ding , Ming Jin , Javad Lavaei

We study minimax optimal reinforcement learning in episodic factored Markov decision processes (FMDPs), which are MDPs with conditionally independent transition components. Assuming the factorization is known, we propose two model-based…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-25 Yi Tian , Jian Qian , Suvrit Sra

This paper studies model-based reinforcement learning (RL) for regret minimization. We focus on finite-horizon episodic RL where the transition model $P$ belongs to a known family of models $\mathcal{P}$, a special case of which is when…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-02 Alex Ayoub , Zeyu Jia , Csaba Szepesvari , Mengdi Wang , Lin F. Yang

Process reward models (PRMs) allow for fine-grained credit assignment in reinforcement learning (RL), and seemingly contrast with outcome reward models (ORMs), which assign a single reward to an entire trajectory. However, we provide…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Michael Sullivan , Alexander Koller

Reward machines (RMs) are automata structures that encode (non-Markovian) reward functions for reinforcement learning (RL). RMs can reward any behaviour representable in regular languages and, when paired with RL algorithms that exploit RM…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-11-13 Giovanni Varricchione , Toryn Q. Klassen , Natasha Alechina , Mehdi Dastani , Brian Logan , Sheila A. McIlraith

We study the constrained reinforcement learning problem, in which an agent aims to maximize the expected cumulative reward subject to a constraint on the expected total value of a utility function. In contrast to existing model-based…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-10 Arnob Ghosh , Xingyu Zhou , Ness Shroff

We study learning in periodic Markov Decision Process(MDP), a special type of non-stationary MDP where both the state transition probabilities and reward functions vary periodically, under the average reward maximization setting. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-26 Ayush Aniket , Arpan Chattopadhyay

Reinforcement learning (RL) in Markov decision processes (MDPs) with large state spaces is a challenging problem. The performance of standard RL algorithms degrades drastically with the dimensionality of state space. However, in practice,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-06-21 Kamyar Azizzadenesheli , Alessandro Lazaric , Animashree Anandkumar

Many Reinforcement Learning algorithms assume a Markov reward function to guarantee optimality. However, not all reward functions are Markov. This paper proposes a framework for mapping non-Markov reward functions into equivalent Markov…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-19 Gregory Hyde , Eugene Santos

This work advances randomized exploration in reinforcement learning (RL) with function approximation modeled by linear mixture MDPs. We establish the first prior-dependent Bayesian regret bound for RL with function approximation; and refine…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-03-19 Yingru Li , Zhi-Quan Luo

We study reinforcement learning with linear function approximation where the transition probability and reward functions are linear with respect to a feature mapping $\boldsymbol{\phi}(s,a)$. Specifically, we consider the episodic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-31 Pihe Hu , Yu Chen , Longbo Huang

In this paper, we propose and study opportunistic reinforcement learning - a new variant of reinforcement learning problems where the regret of selecting a suboptimal action varies under an external environmental condition known as the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-26 Xiaoxiao Wang , Nader Bouacida , Xueying Guo , Xin Liu

The expected regret of any reinforcement learning algorithm is lower bounded by $\Omega\left(\sqrt{DXAT}\right)$ for undiscounted returns, where $D$ is the diameter of the Markov decision process, $X$ the size of the state space, $A$ the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-10 Lucas Weber , Ana Bušić , Jiamin Zhu

The specification of aMarkov decision process (MDP) can be difficult. Reward function specification is especially problematic; in practice, it is often cognitively complex and time-consuming for users to precisely specify rewards. This work…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2012-05-14 Kevin Regan , Craig Boutilier

The standard RL world model is that of a Markov Decision Process (MDP). A basic premise of MDPs is that the rewards depend on the last state and action only. Yet, many real-world rewards are non-Markovian. For example, a reward for bringing…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2019-12-06 Maor Gaon , Ronen I. Brafman