Relax but stay in control: from value to algorithms for online Markov decision processes

Abstract: Online learning algorithms are designed to perform in non-stationary environments, but generally there is no notion of a dynamic state to model constraints on current and future actions as a function of past actions. State-based models are common in stochastic control settings, but commonly used frameworks such as Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) assume a known stationary environment. In recent years, there has been a growing interest in combining the above two frameworks and considering an MDP setting in which the cost function is allowed to change arbitrarily after each time step. However, most of the work in this area has been algorithmic: given a problem, one would develop an algorithm almost from scratch. Moreover, the presence of the state and the assumption of an arbitrarily varying environment complicate both the theoretical analysis and the development of computationally efficient methods. This paper describes a broad extension of the ideas proposed by Rakhlin et al. to give a general framework for deriving algorithms in an MDP setting with arbitrarily changing costs. This framework leads to a unifying view of existing methods and provides a general procedure for constructing new ones. Several new methods are presented, and one of them is shown to have important advantages over a similar method developed from scratch via an online version of approximate dynamic programming.