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We study a Markov matching market involving a planner and a set of strategic agents on the two sides of the market. At each step, the agents are presented with a dynamical context, where the contexts determine the utilities. The planner…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-09 Yifei Min , Tianhao Wang , Ruitu Xu , Zhaoran Wang , Michael I. Jordan , Zhuoran Yang

The theory of reinforcement learning has focused on two fundamental problems: achieving low regret, and identifying $\epsilon$-optimal policies. While a simple reduction allows one to apply a low-regret algorithm to obtain an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-23 Andrew Wagenmaker , Max Simchowitz , Kevin Jamieson

In this paper, we present a learning algorithm that achieves asymptotically optimal regret for Markov decision processes in average reward under a communicating assumption. That is, given a communicating Markov decision process $M$, our…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-26 Victor Boone

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 optimization methods are popular reinforcement learning algorithms in practice. Recent works have built theoretical foundation for them by proving $\sqrt{T}$ regret bounds even when the losses are adversarial. Such bounds are tight…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-21 Christoph Dann , Chen-Yu Wei , Julian Zimmert

In many applications of Reinforcement Learning (RL), it is critically important that the algorithm performs safely, such that instantaneous hard constraints are satisfied at each step, and unsafe states and actions are avoided. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-10 Ming Shi , Yingbin Liang , Ness Shroff

In this paper, we study reinforcement learning in Markov Decision Processes with Probabilistic Reward Machines (PRMs), a form of non-Markovian reward commonly found in robotics tasks. We design an algorithm for PRMs that achieves a regret…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-08-21 Xiaofeng Lin , Xuezhou Zhang

Various algorithms in reinforcement learning exhibit dramatic variability in their convergence rates and ultimate accuracy as a function of the problem structure. Such instance-specific behavior is not captured by existing global minimax…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-06-29 Koulik Khamaru , Eric Xia , Martin J. Wainwright , Michael I. Jordan

Reinforcement Learning algorithms that learn from human feedback (RLHF) need to be efficient in terms of statistical complexity, computational complexity, and query complexity. In this work, we consider the RLHF setting where the feedback…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-14 Runzhe Wu , Wen Sun

We consider reinforcement learning for continuous-time Markov decision processes (MDPs) in the infinite-horizon, average-reward setting. In contrast to discrete-time MDPs, a continuous-time process moves to a state and stays there for a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-03 Xuefeng Gao , Xun Yu Zhou

We study safe reinforcement learning in finite-horizon linear mixture constrained Markov decision processes (CMDPs) with adversarial rewards under full-information feedback and an unknown transition kernel. We propose a primal-dual policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Kihyun Yu , Seoungbin Bae , Dabeen Lee

In this paper, we propose and study opportunistic reinforcement learning - a new variant of reinforcement learning problems where the regret of selecting a suboptimal action varies under an external environmental condition known as the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-26 Xiaoxiao Wang , Nader Bouacida , Xueying Guo , Xin Liu

In this paper, we consider combinatorial reinforcement learning with preference feedback, where a learning agent sequentially offers an action--an assortment of multiple items to--a user, whose preference feedback follows a multinomial…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-06-06 Joongkyu Lee , Min-hwan Oh

This work pioneers regret analysis of risk-sensitive reinforcement learning in partially observable environments with hindsight observation, addressing a gap in theoretical exploration. We introduce a novel formulation that integrates…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-29 Tonghe Zhang , Yu Chen , Longbo Huang

In this paper, we consider the problem of online learning of Markov decision processes (MDPs) with very large state spaces. Under the assumptions of realizable function approximation and low Bellman ranks, we develop an online learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-23 Kefan Dong , Jian Peng , Yining Wang , Yuan Zhou

Most known regret bounds for reinforcement learning are either episodic or assume an environment without traps. We derive a regret bound without making either assumption, by allowing the algorithm to occasionally delegate an action to an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-07-22 Vanessa Kosoy

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

This paper studies a recent proposal to use randomized value functions to drive exploration in reinforcement learning. These randomized value functions are generated by injecting random noise into the training data, making the approach…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-23 Daniel Russo

We study online reinforcement learning for finite-horizon deterministic control systems with {\it arbitrary} state and action spaces. Suppose that the transition dynamics and reward function is unknown, but the state and action space is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-07 Lin F. Yang , Chengzhuo Ni , Mengdi Wang

The optimized certainty equivalent (OCE) is a family of risk measures that cover important examples such as entropic risk, conditional value-at-risk and mean-variance models. In this paper, we propose a new episodic risk-sensitive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-09 Wenhao Xu , Xuefeng Gao , Xuedong He