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While learning in an unknown Markov Decision Process (MDP), an agent should trade off exploration to discover new information about the MDP, and exploitation of the current knowledge to maximize the reward. Although the agent will…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-16 Evrard Garcelon , Mohammad Ghavamzadeh , Alessandro Lazaric , Matteo Pirotta

We investigate online Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) with adversarially changing loss functions and known transitions. We choose dynamic regret as the performance measure, defined as the performance difference between the learner and any…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-29 Peng Zhao , Long-Fei Li , Zhi-Hua Zhou

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

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

Statistical performance bounds for reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms can be critical for high-stakes applications like healthcare. This paper introduces a new framework for theoretically measuring the performance of such algorithms…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-01-03 Christoph Dann , Tor Lattimore , Emma Brunskill

In this work, we consider the regret minimization problem for reinforcement learning in latent Markov Decision Processes (LMDP). In an LMDP, an MDP is randomly drawn from a set of $M$ possible MDPs at the beginning of the interaction, but…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-10 Jeongyeol Kwon , Yonathan Efroni , Constantine Caramanis , Shie Mannor

We propose an epoch-based reinforcement learning algorithm for infinite-horizon average-cost Markov decision processes (MDPs) that leverages a partial order over a policy class. In this structure, $\pi' \leq \pi$ if data collected under…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-08-07 Zhongjun Zhang , Shipra Agrawal , Ilan Lobel , Sean R. Sinclair , Christina Lee Yu

Any reinforcement learning algorithm that applies to all Markov decision processes (MDPs) will suffer $\Omega(\sqrt{SAT})$ regret on some MDP, where $T$ is the elapsed time and $S$ and $A$ are the cardinalities of the state and action…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2014-11-04 Ian Osband , Benjamin Van Roy

Modern tasks in reinforcement learning have large state and action spaces. To deal with them efficiently, one often uses predefined feature mapping to represent states and actions in a low-dimensional space. In this paper, we study…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-24 Dongruo Zhou , Jiafan He , Quanquan Gu

We study the role of the representation of state-action value functions in regret minimization in finite-horizon Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) with linear structure. We first derive a necessary condition on the representation, called…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-29 Matteo Papini , Andrea Tirinzoni , Aldo Pacchiano , Marcello Restelli , Alessandro Lazaric , Matteo Pirotta

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 study minimax optimal reinforcement learning in episodic factored Markov decision processes (FMDPs), which are MDPs with conditionally independent transition components. Assuming the factorization is known, we propose two model-based…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-25 Yi Tian , Jian Qian , Suvrit Sra

We study the constant regret guarantees in reinforcement learning (RL). Our objective is to design an algorithm that incurs only finite regret over infinite episodes with high probability. We introduce an algorithm, Cert-LSVI-UCB, for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-13 Weitong Zhang , Zhiyuan Fan , Jiafan He , Quanquan Gu

This work examines average-reward reinforcement learning with general policy parametrization. Existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) guarantees for this problem are either suboptimal or hindered by several challenges, including poor scalability…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-07 Swetha Ganesh , Washim Uddin Mondal , Vaneet Aggarwal

This paper focuses on learning a Constrained Markov Decision Process (CMDP) via general parameterized policies. We propose a Primal-Dual based Regularized Accelerated Natural Policy Gradient (PDR-ANPG) algorithm that uses entropy and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-04 Washim Uddin Mondal , Vaneet Aggarwal

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has gained substantial attention across diverse application domains and theoretical investigations. Existing literature on RL theory largely focuses on risk-neutral settings where the decision-maker learns to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-24 Zhengqi Wu , Renyuan Xu

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

Online reinforcement learning (RL) has been widely applied in information processing scenarios, which usually exhibit much uncertainty due to the intrinsic randomness of channels and service demands. In this paper, we consider an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-17 Rongpeng Li

We provide an algorithm that achieves the optimal regret rate in an unknown weakly communicating Markov Decision Process (MDP). The algorithm proceeds in episodes where, in each episode, it picks a policy using regularization based on the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-05-14 Peter L. Bartlett , Ambuj Tewari

We consider multiple parallel Markov decision processes (MDPs) coupled by global constraints, where the time varying objective and constraint functions can only be observed after the decision is made. Special attention is given to how well…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2017-09-12 Xiaohan Wei , Hao Yu , Michael J. Neely