English
Related papers

Related papers: Frozen Policy Iteration: Computationally Efficient…

200 papers

We study the reinforcement learning (RL) problem in a constrained Markov decision process (CMDP), where an agent explores the environment to maximize the expected cumulative reward while satisfying a single constraint on the expected total…

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-29 Zihan Zhang , Qiaomin Xie

In this paper we propose an on-line policy iteration (PI) algorithm for finite-state infinite horizon discounted dynamic programming, whereby the policy improvement operation is done on-line, only for the states that are encountered during…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-06-03 Dimitri Bertsekas

This paper proposes a computationally tractable algorithm for learning infinite-horizon average-reward linear Markov decision processes (MDPs) and linear mixture MDPs under the Bellman optimality condition. While guaranteeing computational…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-25 Woojin Chae , Dabeen Lee

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) aims to find optimal policies in dynamic environments in order to maximize the expected total rewards by leveraging pre-collected data. Learning from heterogeneous data is one of the fundamental…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-10 Rui Miao , Babak Shahbaba , Annie Qu

Many real-world applications, such as those in medical domains, recommendation systems, etc, can be formulated as large state space reinforcement learning problems with only a small budget of the number of policy changes, i.e., low…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-05 Minbo Gao , Tianle Xie , Simon S. Du , Lin F. Yang

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

Recent studies have shown that episodic reinforcement learning (RL) is no harder than bandits when the total reward is bounded by $1$, and proved regret bounds that have a polylogarithmic dependence on the planning horizon $H$. However, it…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-16 Kaixuan Ji , Qingyue Zhao , Jiafan He , Weitong Zhang , Quanquan Gu

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.…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-03-12 Kihyuk Hong , Woojin Chae , Yufan Zhang , Dabeen Lee , Ambuj Tewari

We propose a policy improvement algorithm for Reinforcement Learning (RL) which is called Rerouted Behavior Improvement (RBI). RBI is designed to take into account the evaluation errors of the Q-function. Such errors are common in RL when…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-07-12 Elad Sarafian , Aviv Tamar , Sarit Kraus

We introduce \texttt{OPO-CMDP}, the first policy optimization algorithm for stochastic Contextual Markov Decision Process (CMDPs) under general offline function approximation. Our approach achieves a high probability regret bound of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Orin Levy , Aviv Rosenberg , Alon Cohen , Yishay Mansour

We consider a multi-agent episodic MDP setup where an agent (leader) takes action at each step of the episode followed by another agent (follower). The state evolution and rewards depend on the joint action pair of the leader and the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-10 Arnob Ghosh

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a classical tool to solve network control or policy optimization problems in unknown environments. The original Q-learning suffers from performance and complexity challenges across very large networks. Herein,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-02 Talha Bozkus , Urbashi Mitra

Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms based on high-dimensional function approximation have achieved tremendous empirical success in large-scale problems with an enormous number of states. However, most analysis of such algorithms gives…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-17 Jihao Long , Jiequn Han , Weinan E

We consider the problem of learning the optimal policy for Markov decision processes with safety constraints. We formulate the problem in a reach-avoid setup. Our goal is to design online reinforcement learning algorithms that ensure safety…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-21 Abhijit Mazumdar , Rafal Wisniewski , Manuela L. Bujorianu

Policy iteration (PI) is a recursive process of policy evaluation and improvement for solving an optimal decision-making/control problem, or in other words, a reinforcement learning (RL) problem. PI has also served as the fundamental for…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-04-06 Jaeyoung Lee , Richard S. Sutton

One of the fundamental challenges for offline reinforcement learning (RL) is ensuring robustness to data distribution. Whether the data originates from a near-optimal policy or not, we anticipate that an algorithm should demonstrate its…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-18 Xiaohan Hu , Yi Ma , Chenjun Xiao , Yan Zheng , Jianye Hao

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) enables data-efficient and safe policy learning without online exploration, but its performance often degrades under distribution shift. The learned policy may visit out-of-distribution state-action pairs…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Hongqiang Lin , Zhenghui Fu , Weihao Tang , Pengfei Wang , Yiding Sun , Qixian Huang , Dongxu Zhang

Decision-making under distribution shift is a central challenge in reinforcement learning (RL), where training and deployment environments differ. We study this problem through the lens of robust Markov decision processes (RMDPs), which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-17 Jingwen Gu , Yiting He , Zhishuai Liu , Pan Xu

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