English
Related papers

Related papers: Information-Theoretic Minimax Regret Bounds for Re…

200 papers

A long line of works characterizes the sample complexity of regret minimization in sequential decision-making by min-max programs. In the corresponding saddle-point game, the min-player optimizes the sampling distribution against an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-18 Johannes Kirschner , Seyed Alireza Bakhtiari , Kushagra Chandak , Volodymyr Tkachuk , Csaba Szepesvári

Policy design in non-stationary Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) is inherently challenging due to the complexities introduced by time-varying system transition and reward, which make it difficult for learners to determine the optimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-17 Ziyi Zhang , Yorie Nakahira , Guannan Qu

Reinforcement learning with multinomial logistic (MNL) function approximation has become an important framework due to its flexibility and broad applicability. While existing studies have established regret guarantees under worst-case…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-28 Wonyoung Kim , Min-Hwan Oh , Garud Iyengar , Assaf Zeevi

Linear dynamical systems that obey stochastic differential equations are canonical models. While optimal control of known systems has a rich literature, the problem is technically hard under model uncertainty and there are hardly any…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-06-09 Mohamad Kazem Shirani Faradonbeh , Mohamad Sadegh Shirani Faradonbeh

Reinforcement learning (RL) has traditionally been understood from an episodic perspective; the concept of non-episodic RL, where there is no restart and therefore no reliable recovery, remains elusive. A fundamental question in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-31 Shuang Liu , Hao Su

A standard assumption in Reinforcement Learning is that the agent observes every visited state-action pair in the associated Markov Decision Process (MDP), along with the per-step rewards. Strong theoretical results are known in this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Zhengjia Zhuo , Anupam Gupta , Viswanath Nagarajan

We study sequential decision-making in time-varying Markov decision processes (TVMDPs) under limited update rates, where the decision-maker observes the system and updates its model only intermittently. Such settings arise in applications…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-04-16 Negin Musavi , Melkior Ornik

The optimized certainty equivalent (OCE) is a family of risk measures that cover important examples such as entropic risk, conditional value-at-risk and mean-variance models. In this paper, we propose a new episodic risk-sensitive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-09 Wenhao Xu , Xuefeng Gao , Xuedong He

We study continuous-time online learning where data are generated by a diffusion process with unknown coefficients. The learner employs a two-layer neural network, continuously updating its parameters in a non-anticipative manner. The…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Erhan Bayraktar , Bingyan Han , Ziqing Zhang

We study online reinforcement learning in linear Markov decision processes with adversarial losses and bandit feedback, without prior knowledge on transitions or access to simulators. We introduce two algorithms that achieve improved regret…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-19 Haolin Liu , Chen-Yu Wei , Julian Zimmert

We study online inverse linear optimization, also known as contextual recommendation, where a learner sequentially infers an agent's hidden objective vector from observed optimal actions over feasible sets that change over time. The learner…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Taihei Oki , Shinsaku Sakaue

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

This guide provides a reference for high-probability regret bounds in empirical risk minimization (ERM). The presentation is modular: we begin with intuition and general proof strategies, then state broadly applicable guarantees under…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-04 Lars van der Laan

In bandit settings, optimizing long-term regret metrics requires exploration, which corresponds to sometimes taking myopically sub-optimal actions. When a long-lived principal merely recommends actions to be executed by a sequence of…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2026-02-25 Ramya Ramalingam , Osbert Bastani , Aaron Roth

Multitask learning is a powerful framework that enables one to simultaneously learn multiple related tasks by sharing information between them. Quantifying uncertainty in the estimated tasks is of pivotal importance for many downstream…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-04 Pier Giuseppe Sessa , Pierre Laforgue , Nicolò Cesa-Bianchi , Andreas Krause

We present an online learning analysis of minimax adaptive control for the case where the uncertainty includes a finite set of linear dynamical systems. Precisely, for each system inside the uncertainty set, we define the model-based regret…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-09-12 Venkatraman Renganathan , Andrea Iannelli , Anders Rantzer

An important problem in sequential decision-making under uncertainty is to use limited data to compute a safe policy, i.e., a policy that is guaranteed to perform at least as well as a given baseline strategy. In this paper, we develop and…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2016-07-14 Marek Petrik , Yinlam Chow , Mohammad Ghavamzadeh

Learning Markov decision processes (MDPs) in the presence of the adversary is a challenging problem in reinforcement learning (RL). In this paper, we study RL in episodic MDPs with adversarial reward and full information feedback, where the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-21 Jiafan He , Dongruo Zhou , Quanquan Gu

This work studies online episodic tabular Markov decision processes (MDPs) with known transitions and develops best-of-both-worlds algorithms that achieve refined data-dependent regret bounds in the adversarial regime and variance-dependent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Mingyi Li , Taira Tsuchiya , Kenji Yamanishi

In the Bayesian approach to sequential decision making, exact calculation of the (subjective) utility is intractable. This extends to most special cases of interest, such as reinforcement learning problems. While utility bounds are known to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2011-11-14 Christos Dimitrakakis