Related papers: Global Convergence for Average Reward Constrained …
Actor-critic algorithms have shown remarkable success in solving state-of-the-art decision-making problems. However, despite their empirical effectiveness, their theoretical underpinnings remain relatively unexplored, especially with neural…
We study reinforcement learning for continuous-time Markov decision processes (MDPs) in the finite-horizon episodic setting. In contrast to discrete-time MDPs, the inter-transition times of a continuous-time MDP are exponentially…
In recent years, significant attention has been directed towards learning average-reward Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). However, existing algorithms either suffer from sub-optimal regret guarantees or computational inefficiencies. In…
We study discrete-time discounted constrained Markov decision processes (CMDPs) on Borel spaces with unbounded reward functions. In our approach the transition probability functions are weakly or set-wise continuous. The reward functions…
The goal of this paper is to study a distributed version of the gradient temporal-difference (GTD) learning algorithm for multi-agent Markov decision processes (MDPs). The temporal difference (TD) learning is a reinforcement learning (RL)…
The wide popularity of short videos on social media poses new opportunities and challenges to optimize recommender systems on the video-sharing platforms. Users provide complex and multi-faceted responses towards recommendations, including…
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…
This paper studies the optimization of Markov decision processes (MDPs) from a risk-seeking perspective, where the risk is measured by conditional value-at-risk (CVaR). The objective is to find a policy that maximizes the long-run CVaR of…
In this paper, we consider reinforcement learning of Markov Decision Processes (MDP) with peak constraints, where an agent chooses a policy to optimize an objective and at the same time satisfy additional constraints. The agent has to take…
This paper develops a continuous-time primal-dual accelerated method with an increasing damping coefficient for a class of convex optimization problems with affine equality constraints. This paper analyzes critical values for parameters in…
Markov decision processes (MDPs) with large number of states are of high practical interest. However, conventional algorithms to solve MDP are computationally infeasible in this scenario. Approximate dynamic programming (ADP) methods tackle…
We consider partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) with limit-average payoff, where a reward value in the interval [0,1] is associated to every transition, and the payoff of an infinite path is the long-run average of the…
Many existing reinforcement learning (RL) methods employ stochastic gradient iteration on the back end, whose stability hinges upon a hypothesis that the data-generating process mixes exponentially fast with a rate parameter that appears in…
This work considers the sample complexity of obtaining an $\varepsilon$-optimal policy in an average reward Markov Decision Process (AMDP), given access to a generative model (simulator). When the ground-truth MDP is weakly communicating,…
This paper proposes a novel distributed approach for solving a cooperative Constrained Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning (CMARL) problem, where agents seek to minimize a global objective function subject to shared constraints. Unlike…
For infinite-horizon average-cost criterion problems, there exist relatively few rigorous approximation and reinforcement learning results. In this paper, for Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) with standard Borel spaces, (i) we first provide…
Markov decision processes (MDPs) are the defacto frame-work for sequential decision making in the presence ofstochastic uncertainty. A classical optimization criterion forMDPs is to maximize the expected discounted-sum pay-off, which…
Constrained Markov Decision Processes (CMDPs) are notably more complex to solve than standard MDPs due to the absence of universally optimal policies across all initial state distributions. This necessitates re-solving the CMDP whenever the…
We develop a novel unified randomized block-coordinate primal-dual algorithm to solve a class of nonsmooth constrained convex optimization problems, which covers different existing variants and model settings from the literature. We prove…
This paper studies the risk-averse mean-variance optimization in infinite-horizon discounted Markov decision processes (MDPs). The involved variance metric concerns reward variability during the whole process, and future deviations are…