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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 study reinforcement learning (RL) with linear function approximation. For episodic time-inhomogeneous linear Markov decision processes (linear MDPs) whose transition probability can be parameterized as a linear function of a given…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-07 Jiafan He , Heyang Zhao , Dongruo Zhou , Quanquan Gu

We study reinforcement learning for episodic Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) whose transitions are modelled by a multinomial logistic (MNL) model. Existing algorithms for MNL mixture MDPs yield a regret of $\smash{\tilde{O}(dH^2\sqrt{T})}$…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Pierre Boudart , Pierre Gaillard , Alessandro Rudi

Safety is a fundamental challenge in reinforcement learning (RL), particularly in real-world applications such as autonomous driving, robotics, and healthcare. To address this, Constrained Markov Decision Processes (CMDPs) are commonly used…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-18 Chang Liu , Yunfan Li , Lin F. Yang

Recent studies have shown that episodic reinforcement learning (RL) is not more difficult than contextual bandits, even with a long planning horizon and unknown state transitions. However, these results are limited to either tabular Markov…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-24 Dongruo Zhou , Quanquan Gu

Learning Markov decision processes (MDP) in an adversarial environment has been a challenging problem. The problem becomes even more challenging with function approximation, since the underlying structure of the loss function and transition…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-15 Fang Kong , Xiangcheng Zhang , Baoxiang Wang , Shuai Li

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

We study model-based reinforcement learning with non-linear function approximation where the transition function of the underlying Markov decision process (MDP) is given by a multinomial logistic (MNL) model. We develop a provably efficient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-15 Jaehyun Park , Junyeop Kwon , Dabeen Lee

We study infinite-horizon average-reward constrained Markov decision processes (CMDPs) under the weakly communicating assumption. Our contributions are twofold. First, we establish strong duality for weakly communicating average-reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Kihyun Yu , Beomhan Baek , Dabeen Lee

We present a new algorithm based on posterior sampling for learning in constrained Markov decision processes (CMDP) in the infinite-horizon undiscounted setting. The algorithm achieves near-optimal regret bounds while being advantageous…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-28 Danil Provodin , Pratik Gajane , Mykola Pechenizkiy , Maurits Kaptein

Online reinforcement learning in infinite-horizon Markov decision processes (MDPs) remains less theoretically and algorithmically developed than its episodic counterpart, with many algorithms suffering from high ``burn-in'' costs and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-26 Guy Zamir , Matthew Zurek , Yudong Chen

Recently, several studies (Zhou et al., 2021a; Zhang et al., 2021b; Kim et al., 2021; Zhou and Gu, 2022) have provided variance-dependent regret bounds for linear contextual bandits, which interpolates the regret for the worst-case regime…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-22 Heyang Zhao , Jiafan He , Dongruo Zhou , Tong Zhang , Quanquan Gu

We study reinforcement learning with linear function approximation where the transition probability and reward functions are linear with respect to a feature mapping $\boldsymbol{\phi}(s,a)$. Specifically, we consider the episodic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-31 Pihe Hu , Yu Chen , Longbo Huang

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

Constrained Markov Decision Processes (CMDPs) are one of the common ways to model safe reinforcement learning problems, where constraint functions model the safety objectives. Lagrangian-based dual or primal-dual algorithms provide…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-31 Adrian Müller , Pragnya Alatur , Giorgia Ramponi , Niao He

We address the issue of safety in reinforcement learning. We pose the problem in an episodic framework of a constrained Markov decision process. Existing results have shown that it is possible to achieve a reward regret of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-26 Tao Liu , Ruida Zhou , Dileep Kalathil , P. R. Kumar , Chao Tian

We introduce the problem of regret minimization in Adversarial Dueling Bandits. As in classic Dueling Bandits, the learner has to repeatedly choose a pair of items and observe only a relative binary `win-loss' feedback for this pair, but…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-29 Aadirupa Saha , Tomer Koren , Yishay Mansour

This paper presents new \emph{variance-aware} confidence sets for linear bandits and linear mixture Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). With the new confidence sets, we obtain the follow regret bounds: For linear bandits, we obtain an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-01 Zihan Zhang , Jiaqi Yang , Xiangyang Ji , Simon S. Du

We study reward-free reinforcement learning (RL) with linear function approximation, where the agent works in two phases: (1) in the exploration phase, the agent interacts with the environment but cannot access the reward; and (2) in the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-15 Junkai Zhang , Weitong Zhang , Quanquan Gu

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