Title: Beyond Slater’s Condition in Online CMDPs with Stochastic and Adversarial Constraints
Primary area: learning theory
Keywords: CMDPs, online learning

Abstract: We study online episodic Constrained Markov Decision Processes (CMDPs) under both stochastic and adversarial constraints. We provide a novel algorithm whose guarantees greatly improve those of the state-of-the-art best-of-both-worlds algorithm introduced by Stradi et al. (2025). In the stochastic regime, i.e., when the constraints are sampled from fixed but unknown distributions, our method achieves $\widetilde{\mathcal{O}}(\sqrt{T})$ regret and constraint violation without relying on Slater's condition, thereby handling settings where no strictly feasible solution exists. Moreover, we provide guarantees on the stronger notion of positive constraint violation, which does not allow to recover from large violation in the early episodes by playing strictly safe policies. In the adversarial regime, i.e., when the constraints may change arbitrarily between episodes, our algorithm ensures sublinear constraint violation without Slater's condition, and
achieves sublinear $\alpha$-regret with respect to the unconstrained optimum, where $\alpha$ is a suitably defined multiplicative approximation factor. We further validate our results through synthetic experiments, showing the practical effectiveness of our algorithm.