English
Related papers

Related papers: Optimal Sample Complexity for Single Time-Scale Ac…

200 papers

Recent studies have increasingly focused on non-asymptotic convergence analyses for actor-critic (AC) algorithms. One such effort introduced a two-timescale critic-actor algorithm for the discounted cost setting using a tabular…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Prashansa Panda , Shalabh Bhatnagar

Quantum mechanics for many-body systems may be reduced to the evaluation of integrals in 3N dimensions using Monte-Carlo, providing the Quantum Monte Carlo ab initio methods. Here we limit ourselves to expectation values for trial…

Computational Physics · Physics 2010-11-22 John Robert Trail , Ryo Maezono

In this work, we study the problem of finding robust and safe policies in Robust Constrained Average-Cost Markov Decision Processes (RCMDPs). A key challenge in this setting is the lack of strong duality, which prevents the direct use of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Anirudh Satheesh , Sooraj Sathish , Swetha Ganesh , Keenan Powell , Vaneet Aggarwal

We study the problem of efficient exploration in order to learn an accurate model of an environment, modeled as a Markov decision process (MDP). Efficient exploration in this problem requires the agent to identify the regions in which…

We study infinite-horizon Discounted Markov Decision Processes (DMDPs) under a generative model. Motivated by the Algorithm with Advice framework Mitzenmacher and Vassilvitskii 2022, we propose a novel framework to investigate how a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-24 Lixing Lyu , Jiashuo Jiang , Wang Chi Cheung

While deep reinforcement learning has achieved tremendous successes in various applications, most existing works only focus on maximizing the expected value of total return and thus ignore its inherent stochasticity. Such stochasticity is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-19 Han Zhong , Xun Deng , Ethan X. Fang , Zhuoran Yang , Zhaoran Wang , Runze Li

As an important framework for safe Reinforcement Learning, the Constrained Markov Decision Process (CMDP) has been extensively studied in the recent literature. However, despite the rich results under various on-policy learning settings,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-14 Fan Chen , Junyu Zhang , Zaiwen Wen

In this paper, we consider a class of continuous-time, continuous-space stochastic optimal control problems. Building upon recent advances in Markov chain approximation methods and sampling-based algorithms for deterministic path planning,…

Robotics · Computer Science 2012-02-27 Vu Anh Huynh , Sertac Karaman , Emilio Frazzoli

Many popular practical reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms employ evolving reward functions-through techniques such as reward shaping, entropy regularization, or curriculum learning-yet their theoretical foundations remain…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-15 Rui Hu , Yu Chen , Longbo Huang

We provide faster randomized algorithms for computing an $\epsilon$-optimal policy in a discounted Markov decision process with $A_{\text{tot}}$-state-action pairs, bounded rewards, and discount factor $\gamma$. We provide an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-22 Yujia Jin , Ishani Karmarkar , Aaron Sidford , Jiayi Wang

In this paper, we propose a distributed off-policy actor critic method to solve multi-agent reinforcement learning problems. Specifically, we assume that all agents keep local estimates of the global optimal policy parameter and update…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-03-25 Yan Zhang , Michael M. Zavlanos

Rejection Sampling is a fundamental Monte-Carlo method. It is used to sample from distributions admitting a probability density function which can be evaluated exactly at any given point, albeit at a high computational cost. However,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-10-23 Juliette Achdou , Joseph C. Lam , Alexandra Carpentier , Gilles Blanchard

We study how to learn $\epsilon$-optimal strategies in zero-sum imperfect information games (IIG) with trajectory feedback. In this setting, players update their policies sequentially based on their observations over a fixed number of…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2023-09-06 Côme Fiegel , Pierre Ménard , Tadashi Kozuno , Rémi Munos , Vianney Perchet , Michal Valko

In this paper, we settle the sampling complexity of solving discounted two-player turn-based zero-sum stochastic games up to polylogarithmic factors. Given a stochastic game with discount factor $\gamma\in(0,1)$ we provide an algorithm that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-08-30 Aaron Sidford , Mengdi Wang , Lin F. Yang , Yinyu Ye

Most current sampling algorithms for high-dimensional distributions are based on MCMC techniques and are approximate in the sense that they are valid only asymptotically. Rejection sampling, on the other hand, produces valid samples, but is…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2012-07-04 Marc Dymetman , Guillaume Bouchard , Simon Carter

We consider the problem of learning in adversarial Markov decision processes [MDPs] with an oblivious adversary in a full-information setting. The agent interacts with an environment during $T$ episodes, each of which consists of $H$…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-06 Daniil Tiapkin , Evgenii Chzhen , Gilles Stoltz

We adapt recent tools developed for the analysis of Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) in non-convex optimization to obtain convergence and sample complexity guarantees for the vanilla policy gradient (PG). Our only assumptions are that the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-21 Rui Yuan , Robert M. Gower , Alessandro Lazaric

Multi-agent robust reinforcement learning, also known as multi-player robust Markov games (RMGs), is a crucial framework for modeling competitive interactions under environmental uncertainties, with wide applications in multi-agent systems.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-31 Yuchen Jiao , Gen Li

Designing sample-efficient and computationally feasible reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms is particularly challenging in environments with large or infinite state and action spaces. In this paper, we advance this effort by presenting…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-04 Zakaria Mhammedi

This paper studies multi-agent reinforcement learning in Markov games, with the goal of learning Nash equilibria or coarse correlated equilibria (CCE) sample-optimally. All prior results suffer from at least one of the two obstacles: the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-13 Gen Li , Yuejie Chi , Yuting Wei , Yuxin Chen