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This paper presents a discrete-time option pricing model that is rooted in Reinforcement Learning (RL), and more specifically in the famous Q-Learning method of RL. We construct a risk-adjusted Markov Decision Process for a discrete-time…

Computational Finance · Quantitative Finance 2019-09-04 Igor Halperin

The centralized training for decentralized execution paradigm emerged as the state-of-the-art approach to $\epsilon$-optimally solving decentralized partially observable Markov decision processes. However, scalability remains a significant…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-14 Johan Peralez , Aurèlien Delage , Jacopo Castellini , Rafael F. Cunha , Jilles S. Dibangoye

Average-reward reinforcement learning requires estimating the gain and the bias, which is defined only up to an additive constant. This makes direct distributional analogues ill-posed on the real line. We introduce a quotient-space…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Ege C. Kaya , Aliasghar Pourghani , Vijay Gupta , Abolfazl Hashemi

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,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-26 Vaneet Aggarwal , Washim Uddin Mondal , Qinbo Bai

We study offline reinforcement learning under $Q^\star$-approximation and partial coverage, a setting that motivates practical algorithms such as Conservative $Q$-Learning (CQL; Kumar et al., 2020) but has received limited theoretical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-13 Haolin Liu , Braham Snyder , Chen-Yu Wei

Large-scale multi-agent systems are often deployed across wide geographic areas, where agents interact with heterogeneous environments. There is an emerging interest in understanding the role of heterogeneity in the performance of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-18 Leo Muxing Wang , Pengkun Yang , Lili Su

Robust reinforcement learning (RL) under the average-reward criterion is essential for long-term decision-making, particularly when the environment may differ from its specification. However, a significant gap exists in understanding the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-26 Zachary Roch , Chi Zhang , George Atia , Yue Wang

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

In this paper, we introduce a unified framework for analyzing a large family of Q-learning algorithms, based on switching system perspectives and ODE-based stochastic approximation. We show that the nonlinear ODE models associated with…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-02-18 Donghwan Lee , Niao He

When function approximation is used, solving the Bellman optimality equation with stability guarantees has remained a major open problem in reinforcement learning for decades. The fundamental difficulty is that the Bellman operator may…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-06-07 Bo Dai , Albert Shaw , Lihong Li , Lin Xiao , Niao He , Zhen Liu , Jianshu Chen , Le Song

The average reward is a fundamental performance metric in reinforcement learning (RL) focusing on the long-run performance of an agent. Differential temporal difference (TD) learning algorithms are a major advance for average reward RL as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-19 Ethan Blaser , Jiuqi Wang , Shangtong Zhang

Reinforcement learning has witnessed significant advancements, particularly with the emergence of model-based approaches. Among these, $Q$-learning has proven to be a powerful algorithm in model-free settings. However, the extension of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Han-Dong Lim , HyeAnn Lee , Donghwan Lee

For the problem of task-agnostic reinforcement learning (RL), an agent first collects samples from an unknown environment without the supervision of reward signals, then is revealed with a reward and is asked to compute a corresponding…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-16 Jingfeng Wu , Vladimir Braverman , Lin F. Yang

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

Achieving convergence of multiple learning agents in general $N$-player games is imperative for the development of safe and reliable machine learning (ML) algorithms and their application to autonomous systems. Yet it is known that, outside…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2023-01-24 Aamal Abbas Hussain , Francesco Belardinelli , Georgios Piliouras

Based on discrete observations $X_0,X_{\Delta},\dots, X_{n\Delta}$ for $\Delta=n^{-\gamma}$ with $\gamma\in [0,1)$ of the null-recurrent dynamic $dX_t = \sigma(X_t)dW_t$ with a Brownian motion $W$ and $\sigma(x)=\alpha\mathbb{1}\{x<\rho\} +…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2026-04-29 Johannes Brutsche , Sebastian Hahn , Angelika Rohde

In reinforcement learning the Q-values summarize the expected future rewards that the agent will attain. However, they cannot capture the epistemic uncertainty about those rewards. In this work we derive a new Bellman operator with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-07 Brendan O'Donoghue

As a paradigm for sequential decision making in unknown environments, reinforcement learning (RL) has received a flurry of attention in recent years. However, the explosion of model complexity in emerging applications and the presence of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-07-22 Yuejie Chi , Yuxin Chen , Yuting Wei

Recent works in Learning-Based Model Predictive Control of dynamical systems show impressive sample complexity performances using criteria from Information Theory to accelerate the learning procedure. However, the sequential exploration…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-25 Rémy Hosseinkhan-Boucher , Onofrio Semeraro , Lionel Mathelin

We consider un-discounted reinforcement learning (RL) in Markov decision processes (MDPs) under drifting non-stationarity, i.e., both the reward and state transition distributions are allowed to evolve over time, as long as their respective…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-26 Wang Chi Cheung , David Simchi-Levi , Ruihao Zhu