cs.LGMar 29, 2026

Near-Optimal Primal-Dual Algorithm for Learning Linear Mixture CMDPs with Adversarial Rewards

Authors: Kihyun Yu, Seoungbin Bae, Dabeen Lee

Organizations: Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, KAIST · Department of Mathematical Sciences, Seoul National University · Research Institute of Mathematics, Seoul National University · Interdisciplinary Program in Artificial Intelligence, Seoul National University · 

Abstract

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 optimization algorithm that achieves regret and constraint violation bounds of O~(d2H3K)\widetilde{O}(\sqrt{d^2 H^3 K}) under mild conditions, where dd is the feature dimension, HH is the horizon, and KK is the number of episodes. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first provably efficient algorithm for linear mixture CMDPs with adversarial rewards. In particular, our regret bound is near-optimal, matching the known minimax lower bound up to logarithmic factors. The key idea is to introduce a regularized dual update that enables a drift-based analysis. This step is essential, as strong duality-based analysis cannot be directly applied when reward functions change across episodes. In addition, we extend weighted ridge regression-based parameter estimation to the constrained setting, allowing us to construct tighter confidence intervals that are crucial for deriving the near-optimal regret bound.

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