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To overcome the curses of dimensionality and modeling of Dynamic Programming (DP) methods to solve Markov Decision Process (MDP) problems, Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods are adopted in practice. Contrary to traditional RL algorithms…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-08-24 Arghyadip Roy , Vivek Borkar , Abhay Karandikar , Prasanna Chaporkar

We focus on analyzing the classical stochastic projected gradient methods under a general dependent data sampling scheme for constrained smooth nonconvex optimization. We show the worst-case rate of convergence $\tilde{O}(t^{-1/4})$ and…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-06-26 Ahmet Alacaoglu , Hanbaek Lyu

We consider Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning (MAML) methods for Reinforcement Learning (RL) problems, where the goal is to find a policy using data from several tasks represented by Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) that can be updated by one…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-18 Alireza Fallah , Kristian Georgiev , Aryan Mokhtari , Asuman Ozdaglar

While much progress has been made in understanding the minimax sample complexity of reinforcement learning (RL) -- the complexity of learning on the "worst-case" instance -- such measures of complexity often do not capture the true…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-21 Andrew Wagenmaker , Kevin Jamieson

Constrained Reinforcement Learning (CRL) tackles sequential decision-making problems where agents are required to achieve goals by maximizing the expected return while meeting domain-specific constraints, which are often formulated as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-13 Alessandro Montenegro , Marco Mussi , Matteo Papini , Alberto Maria Metelli

Reinforcement learning (RL) problems over general state and action spaces are notoriously challenging. In contrast to the tableau setting, one can not enumerate all the states and then iteratively update the policies for each state. This…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Caleb Ju , Guanghui Lan

Entropy regularized algorithms such as Soft Q-learning and Soft Actor-Critic, recently showed state-of-the-art performance on a number of challenging reinforcement learning (RL) tasks. The regularized formulation modifies the standard RL…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-10-15 Elena Smirnova , Elvis Dohmatob

The theory of reinforcement learning has focused on two fundamental problems: achieving low regret, and identifying $\epsilon$-optimal policies. While a simple reduction allows one to apply a low-regret algorithm to obtain an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-23 Andrew Wagenmaker , Max Simchowitz , Kevin Jamieson

Recently, robust reinforcement learning (RL) methods against input observation have garnered significant attention and undergone rapid evolution due to RL's potential vulnerability. Although these advanced methods have achieved reasonable…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-04 Kosuke Nakanishi , Akihiro Kubo , Yuji Yasui , Shin Ishii

Policy optimization is a core component of reinforcement learning (RL), and most existing RL methods directly optimize parameters of a policy based on maximizing the expected total reward, or its surrogate. Though often achieving…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-08-10 Ruiyi Zhang , Changyou Chen , Chunyuan Li , Lawrence Carin

We study offline reinforcement learning in average-reward MDPs, which presents increased challenges from the perspectives of distribution shift and non-uniform coverage, and has been relatively underexamined from a theoretical perspective.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-23 Matthew Zurek , Guy Zamir , Yudong Chen

This paper considers the problem of learning safe policies in the context of reinforcement learning (RL). In particular, we consider the notion of probabilistic safety. This is, we aim to design policies that maintain the state of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-20 Weiqin Chen , Dharmashankar Subramanian , Santiago Paternain

Several works have addressed the problem of incorporating constraints in the reinforcement learning (RL) framework, however majority of them can only guarantee the satisfaction of soft constraints. In this work, we address the problem of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-16 Kwangyeon Kim , Akshita Gupta , Hong-Cheol Choi , Inseok Hwang

Performative reinforcement learning is an emerging dynamical decision making framework, which extends reinforcement learning to the common applications where the agent's policy can change the environmental dynamics. Existing works on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Ziyi Chen , Heng Huang

Constrained Reinforcement Learning (CRL) addresses sequential decision-making problems where agents are required to achieve goals by maximizing the expected return while meeting domain-specific constraints. In this setting, policy-based…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-09 Alessandro Montenegro , Leonardo Cesani , Marco Mussi , Matteo Papini , Alberto Maria Metelli

In standard reinforcement learning (RL), a learning agent seeks to optimize the overall reward. However, many key aspects of a desired behavior are more naturally expressed as constraints. For instance, the designer may want to limit the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-29 Sobhan Miryoosefi , Kianté Brantley , Hal Daumé , Miroslav Dudik , Robert Schapire

Reinforcement learning (RL) problems are fundamental in online decision-making and have been instrumental in finding an optimal policy for Markov decision processes (MDPs). Function approximations are usually deployed to handle large or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Jiashuo Jiang , Yiming Zong , Yinyu Ye

In this paper, we study a second-order approach to policy optimization in reinforcement learning. Existing second-order methods often suffer from suboptimal sample complexity or rely on unrealistic assumptions about importance sampling. To…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-15 Cheng Sun , Zhen Zhang , Shaofu Yang

We present a reduction from reinforcement learning (RL) to no-regret online learning based on the saddle-point formulation of RL, by which "any" online algorithm with sublinear regret can generate policies with provable performance…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-03 Ching-An Cheng , Remi Tachet des Combes , Byron Boots , Geoff Gordon

In this paper, we consider the problem of learning safe policies for probabilistic-constrained reinforcement learning (RL). Specifically, a safe policy or controller is one that, with high probability, maintains the trajectory of the agent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-14 Weiqin Chen , Dharmashankar Subramanian , Santiago Paternain