Related papers: Primal-Dual Policy Optimization for Linear CMDPs w…

We develop a novel primal-dual algorithm to solve a class of nonsmooth and nonlinear compositional convex minimization problems, which covers many existing and brand-new models as special cases. Our approach relies on a combination of a new…

It is common to address the curse of dimensionality in Markov decision processes (MDPs) by exploiting low-rank representations. This motivates much of the recent theoretical study on linear MDPs. However, most approaches require a given…

To plan safely in uncertain environments, agents must balance utility with safety constraints. Safe planning problems can be modeled as a chance-constrained partially observable Markov decision process (CC-POMDP) and solutions often use…

We consider approximate dynamic programming in $\gamma$-discounted Markov decision processes and apply it to approximate planning with linear value-function approximation. Our first contribution is a new variant of Approximate Policy…

We study a novel variant of online finite-horizon Markov Decision Processes with adversarially changing loss functions and initially unknown dynamics. In each episode, the learner suffers the loss accumulated along the trajectory realized…

This paper addresses the problem of optimal control of robotic sensing systems aimed at autonomous information gathering in scenarios such as environmental monitoring, search and rescue, and surveillance and reconnaissance. The information…

Practical reinforcement learning problems are often formulated as constrained Markov decision process (CMDP) problems, in which the agent has to maximize the expected return while satisfying a set of prescribed safety constraints. In this…

In this work, we focus on the problem of safe policy transfer in reinforcement learning: we seek to leverage existing policies when learning a new task with specified constraints. This problem is important for safety-critical applications…

We study computationally and statistically efficient reinforcement learning under the linear $Q^{\pi}$ realizability assumption, where any policy's $Q$-function is linear in a given state-action feature representation. Prior methods in this…

We study the problem of learning Markov decision processes with finite state and action spaces when the transition probability distributions and loss functions are chosen adversarially and are allowed to change with time. We introduce an…

We study infinite-horizon Constrained Markov Decision Processes (CMDPs) with general policy parameterizations and multi-layer neural network critics. Existing theoretical analyses for constrained reinforcement learning largely rely on…

We study reinforcement learning in MDPs whose transition function is stochastic at most steps but may behave adversarially at a fixed subset of $\Lambda$ steps per episode. This model captures environments that are stable except at a few…

Safety exploration can be regarded as a constrained Markov decision problem where the expected long-term cost is constrained. Previous off-policy algorithms convert the constrained optimization problem into the corresponding unconstrained…

We develop a regression based primal-dual martingale approach for solving finite time horizon MDPs with general state and action space. As a result, our method allows for the construction of tight upper and lower biased approximations of…

We study a continuous-time primal-dual algorithm for distributed optimization with nonconvex local cost functions over weight-unbalanced digraphs, and analyze its performance from a dissipativity-based perspective. We first reformulate the…

We study the estimation of risk-sensitive policies in reinforcement learning problems defined by a Markov Decision Process (MDPs) whose state and action spaces are countably finite. Prior efforts are predominately afflicted by computational…

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…

Existing approaches to online convex optimization (OCO) make sequential one-slot-ahead decisions, which lead to (possibly adversarial) losses that drive subsequent decision iterates. Their performance is evaluated by the so-called regret…

We present the first finite time global convergence analysis of policy gradient in the context of infinite horizon average reward Markov decision processes (MDPs). Specifically, we focus on ergodic tabular MDPs with finite state and action…

We present a new anytime algorithm that achieves near-optimal regret for any instance of finite stochastic partial monitoring. In particular, the new algorithm achieves the minimax regret, within logarithmic factors, for both "easy" and…