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When deploying artificial agents in real-world environments where they interact with humans, it is crucial that their behavior is aligned with the values, social norms or other requirements of that environment. However, many environments…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-05 Mattijs Baert , Pietro Mazzaglia , Sam Leroux , Pieter Simoens

We study the sample complexity of obtaining an $\epsilon$-optimal policy in \emph{Robust} discounted Markov Decision Processes (RMDPs), given only access to a generative model of the nominal kernel. This problem is widely studied in the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-07 Pierre Clavier , Erwan Le Pennec , Matthieu Geist

We study the sample complexity of learning an $\epsilon$-optimal policy in the Stochastic Shortest Path (SSP) problem. We first derive sample complexity bounds when the learner has access to a generative model. We show that there exists a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-12 Liyu Chen , Andrea Tirinzoni , Matteo Pirotta , Alessandro Lazaric

The aim of this paper is to provide several novel upper bounds on the excess risk with a primal focus on classification problems. We suggest two approaches and the obtained bounds are represented via the distribution dependent local…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2018-03-13 Nikita Zhivotovskiy

Risk-sensitive planning aims to identify policies maximizing some tail-focused metrics in Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). Such an optimization task can be very costly for the most widely used and interpretable metrics such as threshold…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-07-09 Alexandre Marthe , Samuel Bounan , Aurélien Garivier , Claire Vernade

We consider infinite-horizon $\gamma$-discounted (linear) constrained Markov decision processes (CMDPs) where the objective is to find a policy that maximizes the expected cumulative reward subject to expected cumulative constraints. Given…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-29 Xingtu Liu , Lin F. Yang , Sharan Vaswani

We consider a finite-horizon multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem in a Bayesian setting, for which we propose an information relaxation sampling framework. With this framework, we define an intuitive family of control policies that include…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-17 Seungki Min , Costis Maglaras , Ciamac C. Moallemi

We propose a new policy gradient method, named homotopic policy mirror descent (HPMD), for solving discounted, infinite horizon MDPs with finite state and action spaces. HPMD performs a mirror descent type policy update with an additional…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-30 Yan Li , Guanghui Lan , Tuo Zhao

Policy entropy has emerged as a fundamental measure for understanding and controlling exploration in reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) for LLMs. However, existing entropy-aware methods mainly regulate entropy through…

This work focuses on off-policy evaluation (OPE) with function approximation in infinite-horizon undiscounted Markov decision processes (MDPs). For MDPs that are ergodic and linear (i.e. where rewards and dynamics are linear in some known…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-24 Nevena Lazic , Dong Yin , Mehrdad Farajtabar , Nir Levine , Dilan Gorur , Chris Harris , Dale Schuurmans

We develop a model selection approach to tackle reinforcement learning with adversarial corruption in both transition and reward. For finite-horizon tabular MDPs, without prior knowledge on the total amount of corruption, our algorithm…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-31 Chen-Yu Wei , Christoph Dann , Julian Zimmert

This paper addresses the problem of learning optimal control policies for systems with uncertain dynamics and high-level control objectives specified as Linear Temporal Logic (LTL) formulas. Uncertainty is considered in the workspace…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-10-17 Yiannis Kantaros , Jun Wang

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 2024-05-30 Danil Provodin , Maurits Kaptein , Mykola Pechenizkiy

We study risk-sensitive RL where the goal is learn a history-dependent policy that optimizes some risk measure of cumulative rewards. We consider a family of risks called the optimized certainty equivalents (OCE), which captures important…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-03 Kaiwen Wang , Dawen Liang , Nathan Kallus , Wen Sun

In this paper we consider the problem of obtaining sharp bounds for the performance of temporal difference (TD) methods with linear function approximation for policy evaluation in discounted Markov decision processes. We show that a simple…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-06-18 Sergey Samsonov , Daniil Tiapkin , Alexey Naumov , Eric Moulines

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 study the computational complexity of the infinite-horizon discounted-reward Markov Decision Problem (MDP) with a finite state space $|\mathcal{S}|$ and a finite action space $|\mathcal{A}|$. We show that any randomized algorithm needs a…

Computational Complexity · Computer Science 2017-05-24 Yichen Chen , Mengdi Wang

We study the following question in the context of imitation learning for continuous control: how are the underlying stability properties of an expert policy reflected in the sample-complexity of an imitation learning task? We provide the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-18 Stephen Tu , Alexander Robey , Tingnan Zhang , Nikolai Matni

Understanding the fundamental limits of robust supervised learning has emerged as a problem of immense interest, from both practical and theoretical standpoints. In particular, it is critical to determine classifier-agnostic bounds on the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-08 Arjun Nitin Bhagoji , Daniel Cullina , Vikash Sehwag , Prateek Mittal

In a recent paper, the authors proposed a general methodology for probabilistic learning on manifolds. The method was used to generate numerical samples that are statistically consistent with an existing dataset construed as a realization…

Probability · Mathematics 2018-03-30 C. Soizea , R. Ghanem , C. Safta , X. Huan , Z. P. Vane , J. Oefelein , G. Lacaz , H. N. Najm , Q. Tang , X. Chen