Convergent Reinforcement Learning Algorithms for Stochastic Shortest Path Problem

Soumyajit Guin; Shalabh Bhatnagar

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arXiv · 2508.13963

Convergent Reinforcement Learning Algorithms for Stochastic Shortest Path Problem

Soumyajit Guin·Shalabh Bhatnagar

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Abstract

In this paper we propose two algorithms in the tabular setting and an algorithm for the function approximation setting for the Stochastic Shortest Path (SSP) problem. SSP problems form an important class of problems in Reinforcement Learning (RL), as other types of cost-criteria in RL can be formulated in the setting of SSP. We show asymptotic almost-sure convergence for all our algorithms. We observe superior performance of our tabular algorithms compared to other well-known convergent RL algorithms. We further observe reliable performance of our function approximation algorithm compared to other algorithms in the function approximation setting.

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Soumyajit Guin, Shalabh Bhatnagar. 2025-08-19. Convergent Reinforcement Learning Algorithms for Stochastic Shortest Path Problem. https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.13963

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