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Distributionally robust reinforcement learning (DRRL) focuses on designing policies that achieve good performance under model uncertainties. The goal is to maximize the worst-case long-term discounted reward, where the data for RL comes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Saptarshi Mandal , Yashaswini Murthy , R. Srikant

The Robust Markov Decision Process (RMDP) framework focuses on designing control policies that are robust against the parameter uncertainties due to the mismatches between the simulator model and real-world settings. An RMDP problem is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-17 Kishan Panaganti , Dileep Kalathil

In reward-free reinforcement learning (RL), an agent explores the environment first without any reward information, in order to achieve certain learning goals afterwards for any given reward. In this paper we focus on reward-free RL under…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-21 Yuan Cheng , Ruiquan Huang , Jing Yang , Yingbin Liang

We prove new upper and lower bounds for sample complexity of finding an $\epsilon$-optimal policy of an infinite-horizon average-reward Markov decision process (MDP) given access to a generative model. When the mixing time of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-15 Yujia Jin , Aaron Sidford

Stochastic and soft optimal policies resulting from entropy-regularized Markov decision processes (ER-MDP) are desirable for exploration and imitation learning applications. Motivated by the fact that such policies are sensitive with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-03 Tien Mai , Patrick Jaillet

In offline reinforcement learning (RL), the absence of active exploration calls for attention on the model robustness to tackle the sim-to-real gap, where the discrepancy between the simulated and deployed environments can significantly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-28 He Wang , Laixi Shi , Yuejie Chi

We study the problem of infinite-horizon average-reward reinforcement learning with linear Markov decision processes (MDPs). The associated Bellman operator of the problem not being a contraction makes the algorithm design challenging.…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-03-12 Kihyuk Hong , Woojin Chae , Yufan Zhang , Dabeen Lee , Ambuj Tewari

Offline reinforcement learning aims to learn from pre-collected datasets without active exploration. This problem faces significant challenges, including limited data availability and distributional shifts. Existing approaches adopt a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-01 Yue Wang , Jinjun Xiong , Shaofeng Zou

We study a new model-free algorithm to compute $\varepsilon$-optimal policies for average reward Markov decision processes, in the weakly communicating case. Given a generative model, our procedure combines a recursive sampling technique…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-06-16 Jongmin Lee , Mario Bravo , Roberto Cominetti

The curse of dimensionality is a widely known issue in reinforcement learning (RL). In the tabular setting where the state space $\mathcal{S}$ and the action space $\mathcal{A}$ are both finite, to obtain a nearly optimal policy with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-28 Bingyan Wang , Yuling Yan , Jianqing Fan

In this study, we derive Probably Approximately Correct (PAC) bounds on the asymptotic sample-complexity for RL within the infinite-horizon Markov Decision Process (MDP) setting that are sharper than those in existing literature. The…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-17 Mohit Prashant , Arvind Easwaran

We consider a reinforcement learning setting in which the deployment environment is different from the training environment. Applying a robust Markov decision processes formulation, we extend the distributionally robust $Q$-learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-02 Shengbo Wang , Nian Si , Jose Blanchet , Zhengyuan Zhou

Traditional reinforcement learning (RL) aims to maximize the expected total reward, while the risk of uncertain outcomes needs to be controlled to ensure reliable performance in a risk-averse setting. In this paper, we consider the problem…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-18 Xian Yu , Siqian Shen

We introduce a novel class of algorithms to efficiently approximate the unknown return distributions in policy evaluation problems from distributional reinforcement learning (DRL). The proposed distributional dynamic programming algorithms…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-07-22 Julian Gerstenberg , Ralph Neininger , Denis Spiegel

Distributionally Robust Optimization (DRO) has enabled to prove the equivalence between robustness and regularization in classification and regression, thus providing an analytical reason why regularization generalizes well in statistical…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-07-15 Esther Derman , Shie Mannor

This paper applies the authors' recent results on asynchronous stochastic approximation (SA) in the Borkar-Meyn framework to reinforcement learning in average-reward semi-Markov decision processes (SMDPs). We establish the convergence of an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-09 Huizhen Yu , Yi Wan , Richard S. Sutton

We study reward-free reinforcement learning (RL) with linear function approximation, where the agent works in two phases: (1) in the exploration phase, the agent interacts with the environment but cannot access the reward; and (2) in the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-15 Junkai Zhang , Weitong Zhang , Quanquan Gu

In this paper, we study the non-asymptotic and asymptotic performances of the optimal robust policy and value function of robust Markov Decision Processes(MDPs), where the optimal robust policy and value function are solved only from a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-08-16 Wenhao Yang , Liangyu Zhang , Zhihua Zhang

The pursuit of robustness has recently been a popular topic in reinforcement learning (RL) research, yet the existing methods generally suffer from efficiency issues that obstruct their real-world implementation. In this paper, we introduce…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-15 Yang Hu , Haitong Ma , Bo Dai , Na Li

Reinforcement learning (RL) is currently one of the most prominent methods for optimizing dynamical systems, with breakthrough results across various fields. The framework is based on the concept of a Markov decision process (MDP), leading…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-11-17 Rene Carmona , Mathieu Lauriere