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We study Markov Decision Processes (MDP) wherein states correspond to causal graphs that stochastically generate rewards. In this setup, the learner's goal is to identify atomic interventions that lead to high rewards by intervening on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-02 Rahul Madhavan , Aurghya Maiti , Gaurav Sinha , Siddharth Barman

Policy design in non-stationary Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) is inherently challenging due to the complexities introduced by time-varying system transition and reward, which make it difficult for learners to determine the optimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-17 Ziyi Zhang , Yorie Nakahira , Guannan Qu

We study online reinforcement learning in linear Markov decision processes with adversarial losses and bandit feedback, without prior knowledge on transitions or access to simulators. We introduce two algorithms that achieve improved regret…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-19 Haolin Liu , Chen-Yu Wei , Julian Zimmert

Strong worst-case performance bounds for episodic reinforcement learning exist but fortunately in practice RL algorithms perform much better than such bounds would predict. Algorithms and theory that provide strong problem-dependent bounds…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-05 Andrea Zanette , Emma Brunskill

We consider online reinforcement learning in episodic Markov decision process (MDP) with unknown transition function and stochastic rewards drawn from some fixed but unknown distribution. The learner aims to learn the optimal policy and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-12 Vincent Leon , S. Rasoul Etesami

We consider online learning for episodic stochastically constrained Markov decision processes (CMDPs), which plays a central role in ensuring the safety of reinforcement learning. Here the loss function can vary arbitrarily across the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-19 Shuang Qiu , Xiaohan Wei , Zhuoran Yang , Jieping Ye , Zhaoran Wang

We consider online learning in episodic loop-free Markov decision processes (MDPs), where the loss function can change arbitrarily between episodes, and the transition function is not known to the learner. We show…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-21 Aviv Rosenberg , Yishay Mansour

Stochastic and adversarial data are two widely studied settings in online learning. But many optimization tasks are neither i.i.d. nor fully adversarial, which makes it of fundamental interest to get a better theoretical understanding of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-09 Sarah Sachs , Hédi Hadiji , Tim van Erven , Cristóbal Guzmán

In online learning problems, exploiting low variance plays an important role in obtaining tight performance guarantees yet is challenging because variances are often not known a priori. Recently, considerable progress has been made by Zhang…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-02-07 Yeoneung Kim , Insoon Yang , Kwang-Sung Jun

In the optimization of dynamical systems, the variables typically have constraints. Such problems can be modeled as a constrained Markov Decision Process (CMDP). This paper considers a model-free approach to the problem, where the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-02 Qinbo Bai , Vaneet Aggarwal , Ather Gattami

We study reinforcement learning for continuous-time Markov decision processes (MDPs) in the finite-horizon episodic setting. In contrast to discrete-time MDPs, the inter-transition times of a continuous-time MDP are exponentially…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-04 Xuefeng Gao , Xun Yu Zhou

We consider a stochastic inventory control problem under censored demands, lost sales, and positive lead times. This is a fundamental problem in inventory management, with significant literature establishing near-optimality of a simple…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-14 Shipra Agrawal , Randy Jia

Policy optimization methods are popular reinforcement learning algorithms in practice. Recent works have built theoretical foundation for them by proving $\sqrt{T}$ regret bounds even when the losses are adversarial. Such bounds are tight…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-21 Christoph Dann , Chen-Yu Wei , Julian Zimmert

In this paper, we study the episodic reinforcement learning (RL) problem modeled by finite-horizon Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) with constraint on the number of batches. The multi-batch reinforcement learning framework, where the agent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-18 Zihan Zhang , Yuhang Jiang , Yuan Zhou , Xiangyang Ji

We study \emph{online episodic Constrained Markov Decision Processes} (CMDPs) under both stochastic and adversarial constraints. We provide a novel algorithm whose guarantees greatly improve those of the state-of-the-art best-of-both-worlds…

We study online learning in constrained Markov decision processes (CMDPs) in which rewards and constraints may be either stochastic or adversarial. In such settings, Stradi et al.(2024) proposed the first best-of-both-worlds algorithm able…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-10 Francesco Emanuele Stradi , Anna Lunghi , Matteo Castiglioni , Alberto Marchesi , Nicola Gatti

This paper initiates the study of data-dependent regret bounds in constrained MAB settings. These bounds depend on the sequence of losses that characterize the problem instance. Thus, they can be much smaller than classical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-24 Gianmarco Genalti , Francesco Emanuele Stradi , Matteo Castiglioni , Alberto Marchesi , Nicola Gatti

We study regret minimization for infinite-horizon average-reward Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) under cost constraints. We start by designing a policy optimization algorithm with carefully designed action-value estimator and bonus term,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-02 Liyu Chen , Rahul Jain , Haipeng Luo

Learning Markov decision processes (MDPs) in the presence of the adversary is a challenging problem in reinforcement learning (RL). In this paper, we study RL in episodic MDPs with adversarial reward and full information feedback, where the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-21 Jiafan He , Dongruo Zhou , Quanquan Gu

This work studies the problem of learning episodic Markov Decision Processes with known transition and bandit feedback. We develop the first algorithm with a ``best-of-both-worlds'' guarantee: it achieves $\mathcal{O}(log T)$ regret when…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-03 Tiancheng Jin , Haipeng Luo