English
Related papers

Related papers: Provably Efficient and Agile Randomized Q-Learning

200 papers

Sample complexity bounds are a common performance metric in the Reinforcement Learning literature. In the discounted cost, infinite horizon setting, all of the known bounds have a factor that is a polynomial in $1/(1-\gamma)$, where $\gamma…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-09 Adithya M. Devraj , Sean P. Meyn

We study model-free Q-learning in finite-horizon episodic Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) with stationary dynamics across episodes. We identify a central issue in nascent model-free posterior-sampling works: the reliance on delayed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Sofia R. Miskala-Dinc , Aviva Prins

We study reinforcement learning (RL) for the same class of continuous-time stochastic linear--quadratic (LQ) control problems as in \cite{huang2024sublinear}, where volatilities depend on both states and controls while states are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-24 Yilie Huang , Xun Yu Zhou

We initiate the study of multi-stage episodic reinforcement learning under adversarial corruptions in both the rewards and the transition probabilities of the underlying system extending recent results for the special case of stochastic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-02 Thodoris Lykouris , Max Simchowitz , Aleksandrs Slivkins , Wen Sun

In an episodic Markov Decision Process (MDP) problem, an online algorithm chooses from a set of actions in a sequence of $H$ trials, where $H$ is the episode length, in order to maximize the total payoff of the chosen actions. Q-learning,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-07-11 Xu Zhu

We propose a model-free reinforcement learning algorithm inspired by the popular randomized least squares value iteration (RLSVI) algorithm as well as the optimism principle. Unlike existing upper-confidence-bound (UCB) based approaches,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-27 Haque Ishfaq , Qiwen Cui , Viet Nguyen , Alex Ayoub , Zhuoran Yang , Zhaoran Wang , Doina Precup , Lin F. Yang

Online reinforcement learning in non-episodic, finite-horizon MDPs remains underexplored and is challenged by the need to estimate returns to a fixed terminal time. Existing infinite-horizon methods, which often rely on discounted…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Jiamin Xu , Kyra Gan

We study reinforcement learning with linear function approximation and adversarially changing cost functions, a setup that has mostly been considered under simplifying assumptions such as full information feedback or exploratory…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-31 Uri Sherman , Tomer Koren , Yishay Mansour

In this paper, we propose a new solution to reward adaptation (RA) in reinforcement learning, where the agent adapts to a target reward function based on one or more existing source behaviors learned a priori under the same domain dynamics…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-23 Kevin Vora , Yu Zhang

Recently, there has been a surge of interest in analyzing the non-asymptotic behavior of model-free reinforcement learning algorithms. However, the performance of such algorithms in non-ideal environments, such as in the presence of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-06 Sreejeet Maity , Aritra Mitra

A central issue lying at the heart of online reinforcement learning (RL) is data efficiency. While a number of recent works achieved asymptotically minimal regret in online RL, the optimality of these results is only guaranteed in a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-30 Zihan Zhang , Yuxin Chen , Jason D. Lee , Simon S. Du

Bugs in popular distributed protocol implementations have been the source of many downtimes in popular internet services. We describe a randomized testing approach for distributed protocol implementations based on reinforcement learning.…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-09-05 Andrea Borgarelli , Constantin Enea , Rupak Majumdar , Srinidhi Nagendra

Offline reinforcement learning (offline RL), which aims to find an optimal policy from a previously collected static dataset, bears algorithmic difficulties due to function approximation errors from out-of-distribution (OOD) data points. To…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-06 Gaon An , Seungyong Moon , Jang-Hyun Kim , Hyun Oh Song

In real-world reinforcement learning (RL) systems, various forms of {\it impaired observability} can complicate matters. These situations arise when an agent is unable to observe the most recent state of the system due to latency or lossy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-30 Minshuo Chen , Jie Meng , Yu Bai , Yinyu Ye , H. Vincent Poor , Mengdi Wang

Online strategic classification studies settings in which agents strategically modify their features to obtain favorable predictions. For example, given a classifier that determines loan approval based on credit scores, applicants may open…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-09 Chase Hutton , Adam Melrod , Han Shao

When the data used for reinforcement learning (RL) are collected by multiple agents in a distributed manner, federated versions of RL algorithms allow collaborative learning without the need for agents to share their local data. In this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-14 Jiin Woo , Gauri Joshi , Yuejie Chi

We study lifelong reinforcement learning (RL) in a regret minimization setting of linear contextual Markov decision process (MDP), where the agent needs to learn a multi-task policy while solving a streaming sequence of tasks. We propose an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-02 Sanae Amani , Lin F. Yang , Ching-An Cheng

Existing episodic reinforcement algorithms assume that the length of an episode is fixed across time and known a priori. In this paper, we consider a general framework of episodic reinforcement learning when the length of each episode is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-08 Debmalya Mandal , Goran Radanovic , Jiarui Gan , Adish Singla , Rupak Majumdar

Due to the drastic gap in complexity between sequential and batch statistical learning, recent work has studied a smoothed sequential learning setting, where Nature is constrained to select contexts with density bounded by 1/{\sigma} with…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-05-27 Adam Block , Max Simchowitz

We study the problem of safe offline reinforcement learning (RL), the goal is to learn a policy that maximizes long-term reward while satisfying safety constraints given only offline data, without further interaction with the environment.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-11 Haoran Xu , Xianyuan Zhan , Xiangyu Zhu