Related papers: Finite-Time Bounds for Average-Reward Fitted Q-Ite…
Average-reward reinforcement learning offers a principled framework for long-term decision-making by maximizing the mean reward per time step. Although Q-learning is a widely used model-free algorithm with established sample complexity in…
Q-learning is known as one of the fundamental reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms. Its convergence has been the focus of extensive research over the past several decades. Recently, a new finitetime error bound and analysis for Q-learning…
While reinforcement learning (RL) promises to revolutionize the control of complex nonlinear robotic systems, a profound gap persists between the heuristic success of model-free off-policy deep RL and the underlying theory, which remains…
Motivated by practical applications where stable long-term performance is critical-such as robotics, operations research, and healthcare-we study the problem of distributionally robust (DR) average-reward reinforcement learning. We propose…
This paper analyzes reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms for Markov decision processes (MDPs) under the average-reward criterion. We focus on Q-learning algorithms based on relative value iteration (RVI), which are model-free stochastic…
This work presents the first finite-time analysis for the last-iterate convergence of average-reward $Q$-learning with an asynchronous implementation. A key feature of the algorithm we study is the use of adaptive stepsizes, which serve as…
While there is an extensive body of research on the analysis of Value Iteration (VI) for discounted cumulative-reward MDPs, prior work on analyzing VI for (undiscounted) average-reward MDPs has been limited, and most prior results focus on…
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.…
Offline reinforcement learning (RL) has increasingly become the focus of the artificial intelligent research due to its wide real-world applications where the collection of data may be difficult, time-consuming, or costly. In this paper, we…
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.…
We show two average-reward off-policy control algorithms, Differential Q-learning (Wan, Naik, & Sutton 2021a) and RVI Q-learning (Abounadi Bertsekas & Borkar 2001), converge in weakly communicating MDPs. Weakly communicating MDPs are the…
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…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) serves as a versatile framework for sequential decision-making, finding applications across diverse domains such as robotics, autonomous driving, recommendation systems, supply chain optimization, biology,…
We present the first finite-sample analysis of policy evaluation in robust average-reward Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). Prior work in this setting have established only asymptotic convergence guarantees, leaving open the question of…
Popular Maximum Entropy Inverse Reinforcement Learning approaches require the computation of expected state visitation frequencies for the optimal policy under an estimate of the reward function. This usually requires intermediate value…
We develop several provably efficient model-free reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms for infinite-horizon average-reward Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). We consider both online setting and the setting with access to a simulator. In the…
Reinforcement learning with outcome-based feedback faces a fundamental challenge: when rewards are only observed at trajectory endpoints, how do we assign credit to the right actions? This paper provides the first comprehensive analysis of…
Many policy-based reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms can be viewed as instantiations of approximate policy iteration (PI), i.e., where policy improvement and policy evaluation are both performed approximately. In applications where the…
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…
We study infinite-horizon average-reward Markov decision processes (AMDPs) in the context of general function approximation. Specifically, we propose a novel algorithmic framework named Local-fitted Optimization with OPtimism (LOOP), which…