Related papers: Variance-Based Rewards for Approximate Bayesian Re…
A default assumption in the design of reinforcement-learning algorithms is that a decision-making agent always explores to learn optimal behavior. In sufficiently complex environments that approach the vastness and scale of the real world,…
We study reinforcement learning (RL) problems in which agents observe the reward or transition realizations at their current state before deciding which action to take. Such observations are available in many applications, including…
Despite the close connection between exploration and sample efficiency, most state of the art reinforcement learning algorithms include no considerations for exploration beyond maximizing the entropy of the policy. In this work we address…
Standard reinforcement learning (RL) agents never intelligently explore like a human (i.e. taking into account complex domain priors and adapting quickly based on previous exploration). Across episodes, RL agents struggle to perform even…
This paper proposes a formal approach to online learning and planning for agents operating in a priori unknown, time-varying environments. The proposed method computes the maximally likely model of the environment, given the observations…
In sequential decision-making (SDM) tasks, methods like reinforcement learning (RL) and heuristic search have made notable advances in specific cases. However, they often require extensive exploration and face challenges in generalizing…
Preference-based Reinforcement Learning (PbRL) is a paradigm in which an RL agent learns to optimize a task using pair-wise preference-based feedback over trajectories, rather than explicit reward signals. While PbRL has demonstrated…
We study reinforcement learning from human feedback in general Markov decision processes, where agents learn from trajectory-level preference comparisons. A central challenge in this setting is to design algorithms that select informative…
Model-based Bayesian reinforcement learning has generated significant interest in the AI community as it provides an elegant solution to the optimal exploration-exploitation tradeoff in classical reinforcement learning. Unfortunately, the…
Although parallelism has been extensively used in reinforcement learning (RL), the quantitative effects of parallel exploration are not well understood theoretically. We study the benefits of simple parallel exploration for reward-free RL…
Sparse-reward reinforcement learning (RL) can model a wide range of highly complex tasks. Solving sparse-reward tasks is RL's core premise, requiring efficient exploration coupled with long-horizon credit assignment, and overcoming these…
Multitask Reinforcement Learning (MTRL) approaches have gained increasing attention for its wide applications in many important Reinforcement Learning (RL) tasks. However, while recent advancements in MTRL theory have focused on the…
We study the problem of reinforcement learning in infinite-horizon discounted linear Markov decision processes (MDPs), and propose the first computationally efficient algorithm achieving rate-optimal regret guarantees in this setting. Our…
Temporal abstractions in the form of options have been shown to help reinforcement learning (RL) agents learn faster. However, despite prior work on this topic, the problem of discovering options through interaction with an environment…
Deep reinforcement learning (RL) can acquire complex behaviors from low-level inputs, such as images. However, real-world applications of such methods require generalizing to the vast variability of the real world. Deep networks are known…
One major limitation to the applicability of Reinforcement Learning (RL) to many practical domains is the large number of samples required to learn an optimal policy. To address this problem and improve learning efficiency, we consider a…
We study the challenging exploration incentive problem in both bandit and reinforcement learning, where the rewards are scale-free and potentially unbounded, driven by real-world scenarios and differing from existing work. Past works in…
We consider reinforcement learning (RL) in continuous time and study the problem of achieving the best trade-off between exploration of a black box environment and exploitation of current knowledge. We propose an entropy-regularized reward…
In the Bayesian reinforcement learning (RL) setting, a prior distribution over the unknown problem parameters -- the rewards and transitions -- is assumed, and a policy that optimizes the (posterior) expected return is sought. A common…
Preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL) has emerged as a promising approach for learning behaviors from human feedback without predefined reward functions. However, current PbRL methods face a critical challenge in effectively…