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Adaptive Exploration for Multi-Reward Multi-Policy Evaluation

Machine Learning 2025-08-19 v3 Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning

Abstract

We study the policy evaluation problem in an online multi-reward multi-policy discounted setting, where multiple reward functions must be evaluated simultaneously for different policies. We adopt an (ϵ,δ)(\epsilon,\delta)-PAC perspective to achieve ϵ\epsilon-accurate estimates with high confidence across finite or convex sets of rewards, a setting that has not been investigated in the literature. Building on prior work on Multi-Reward Best Policy Identification, we adapt the MR-NaS exploration scheme to jointly minimize sample complexity for evaluating different policies across different reward sets. Our approach leverages an instance-specific lower bound revealing how the sample complexity scales with a measure of value deviation, guiding the design of an efficient exploration policy. Although computing this bound entails a hard non-convex optimization, we propose an efficient convex approximation that holds for both finite and convex reward sets. Experiments in tabular domains demonstrate the effectiveness of this adaptive exploration scheme.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2502.02516,
  title  = {Adaptive Exploration for Multi-Reward Multi-Policy Evaluation},
  author = {Alessio Russo and Aldo Pacchiano},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2502.02516},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

Accepted at the International Conference on Machine Learning, 2025

R2 v1 2026-06-28T21:32:25.870Z