학술논문

A Policy Gradient Primal-Dual Algorithm for Constrained MDPs with Uniform PAC Guarantees
Document Type
Working Paper
Source
Subject
Computer Science - Machine Learning
Language
Abstract
We study a primal-dual reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm for the online constrained Markov decision processes (CMDP) problem, wherein the agent explores an optimal policy that maximizes return while satisfying constraints. Despite its widespread practical use, the existing theoretical literature on primal-dual RL algorithms for this problem only provides sublinear regret guarantees and fails to ensure convergence to optimal policies. In this paper, we introduce a novel policy gradient primal-dual algorithm with uniform probably approximate correctness (Uniform-PAC) guarantees, simultaneously ensuring convergence to optimal policies, sublinear regret, and polynomial sample complexity for any target accuracy. Notably, this represents the first Uniform-PAC algorithm for the online CMDP problem. In addition to the theoretical guarantees, we empirically demonstrate in a simple CMDP that our algorithm converges to optimal policies, while an existing algorithm exhibits oscillatory performance and constraint violation.