Related papers: Tight Lower Bounds for Multiplicative Weights Algo…
Recently a multi-agent variant of the classical multi-armed bandit was proposed to tackle fairness issues in online learning. Inspired by a long line of work in social choice and economics, the goal is to optimize the Nash social welfare…
We consider a robust aggregation problem in the presence of both truthful and adversarial experts. The truthful experts will report their private signals truthfully, while the adversarial experts can report arbitrarily. We assume experts…
We study the sequential general online regression, known also as the sequential probability assignments, under logarithmic loss when compared against a broad class of experts. We focus on obtaining tight, often matching, lower and upper…
We present an algorithm based on posterior sampling (aka Thompson sampling) that achieves near-optimal worst-case regret bounds when the underlying Markov Decision Process (MDP) is communicating with a finite, though unknown, diameter. Our…
This is a brief technical note to clarify the state of lower bounds on regret for reinforcement learning. In particular, this paper: - Reproduces a lower bound on regret for reinforcement learning, similar to the result of Theorem 5 in the…
We consider the problem of provably optimal exploration in reinforcement learning for finite horizon MDPs. We show that an optimistic modification to value iteration achieves a regret bound of $\tilde{O}( \sqrt{HSAT} + H^2S^2A+H\sqrt{T})$…
We consider the classic online learning and stochastic multi-armed bandit (MAB) problems, when at each step, the online policy can probe and find out which of a small number ($k$) of choices has better reward (or loss) before making its…
We consider adaptive control of the Linear Quadratic Regulator (LQR), where an unknown linear system is controlled subject to quadratic costs. Leveraging recent developments in the estimation of linear systems and in robust controller…
The theory of reinforcement learning currently suffers from a mismatch between its empirical performance and the theoretical characterization of its performance, with consequences for, e.g., the understanding of sample efficiency, safety,…
Dueling bandits are widely used to model preferential feedback prevalent in many applications such as recommendation systems and ranking. In this paper, we study the Borda regret minimization problem for dueling bandits, which aims to…
This paper studies the safe reinforcement learning problem formulated as an episodic finite-horizon tabular constrained Markov decision process with an unknown transition kernel and stochastic reward and cost functions. We propose a…
We develop a novel and generic algorithm for the adversarial multi-armed bandit problem (or more generally the combinatorial semi-bandit problem). When instantiated differently, our algorithm achieves various new data-dependent regret…
A central problem in the theory of empirical Bayes is to control the regret (excess risk) of a learned Bayes rule by the Hellinger distance between the estimated and true marginal densities. In the normal means model, the classical result…
Policy regret is a well established notion of measuring the performance of an online learning algorithm against an adaptive adversary. We study restrictions on the adversary that enable efficient minimization of the \emph{complete policy…
We study reinforcement learning for episodic Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) whose transitions are modelled by a multinomial logistic (MNL) model. Existing algorithms for MNL mixture MDPs yield a regret of $\smash{\tilde{O}(dH^2\sqrt{T})}$…
We propose a simple model selection approach for algorithms in stochastic bandit and reinforcement learning problems. As opposed to prior work that (implicitly) assumes knowledge of the optimal regret, we only require that each base…
A stochastic combinatorial semi-bandit is an online learning problem where at each step a learning agent chooses a subset of ground items subject to constraints, and then observes stochastic weights of these items and receives their sum as…
Any reinforcement learning algorithm that applies to all Markov decision processes (MDPs) will suffer $\Omega(\sqrt{SAT})$ regret on some MDP, where $T$ is the elapsed time and $S$ and $A$ are the cardinalities of the state and action…
Multi-armed Bandit motivates methods with provable upper bounds on regret and also the counterpart lower bounds have been extensively studied in this context. Recently, Multi-agent Multi-armed Bandit has gained significant traction in…
We study the problem of adaptive control of a high dimensional linear quadratic (LQ) system. Previous work established the asymptotic convergence to an optimal controller for various adaptive control schemes. More recently, for the average…