English
Related papers

Related papers: On Oracle-Efficient PAC RL with Rich Observations

200 papers

Exploration in reinforcement learning (RL) remains an open challenge. RL algorithms rely on observing rewards to train the agent, and if informative rewards are sparse the agent learns slowly or may not learn at all. To improve exploration…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-12 Simone Parisi , Alireza Kazemipour , Michael Bowling

Deep latent variable models have achieved significant empirical successes in model-based reinforcement learning (RL) due to their expressiveness in modeling complex transition dynamics. On the other hand, it remains unclear theoretically…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-08 Tongzheng Ren , Chenjun Xiao , Tianjun Zhang , Na Li , Zhaoran Wang , Sujay Sanghavi , Dale Schuurmans , Bo Dai

Learning and planning in partially-observable domains is one of the most difficult problems in reinforcement learning. Traditional methods consider these two problems as independent, resulting in a classical two-stage paradigm: first learn…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2019-11-25 Tianyu Li , Bogdan Mazoure , Doina Precup , Guillaume Rabusseau

We propose and study a new model for reinforcement learning with rich observations, generalizing contextual bandits to sequential decision making. These models require an agent to take actions based on observations (features) with the goal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-10-31 Akshay Krishnamurthy , Alekh Agarwal , John Langford

The standard definition of PAC learning (Valiant 1984) requires learners to succeed under all distributions -- even ones that are intractable to sample from. This stands in contrast to samplable PAC learning (Blum, Furst, Kearns, and Lipton…

Computational Complexity · Computer Science 2025-12-02 Guy Blanc , Caleb Koch , Jane Lange , Carmen Strassle , Li-Yang Tan

The classical algorithms for online learning and decision-making have the benefit of achieving the optimal performance guarantees, but suffer from computational complexity limitations when implemented at scale. More recent sophisticated…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-19 Guanghui Wang , Zihao Hu , Vidya Muthukumar , Jacob Abernethy

Efficient exploration is one of the key challenges for reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms. Most traditional sample efficiency bounds require strategic exploration. Recently many deep RL algorithms with simple heuristic exploration…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-04-19 Yao Liu , Emma Brunskill

We study reward-free reinforcement learning (RL) under general non-linear function approximation, and establish sample efficiency and hardness results under various standard structural assumptions. On the positive side, we propose the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-25 Jinglin Chen , Aditya Modi , Akshay Krishnamurthy , Nan Jiang , Alekh Agarwal

This paper concerns the central issues of model robustness and sample efficiency in offline reinforcement learning (RL), which aims to learn to perform decision making from history data without active exploration. Due to uncertainties and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-01 Laixi Shi , Yuejie Chi

Distributionally robust offline reinforcement learning (RL) aims to find a policy that performs the best under the worst environment within an uncertainty set using an offline dataset collected from a nominal model. While recent advances in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-07 Ruiquan Huang , Yingbin Liang , Jing Yang

Meta-learning for offline reinforcement learning (OMRL) is an understudied problem with tremendous potential impact by enabling RL algorithms in many real-world applications. A popular solution to the problem is to infer task identity as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-18 Lanqing Li , Yuanhao Huang , Mingzhe Chen , Siteng Luo , Dijun Luo , Junzhou Huang

Reinforcement learning (RL) in large environments often suffers from severe computational bottlenecks, as conventional regret minimization algorithms require repeated, costly calls to planning and statistical estimation oracles. While…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-04 Haichen Hu , Jian Qian , David Simchi-Levi

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has been able to solve hard problems such as playing Atari games or solving the game of Go, with a unified approach. Yet modern deep RL approaches are still not widely used in real-world applications. One reason…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-08 Achraf Azize , Othman Gaizi

While reinforcement learning (RL) methods that learn an internal model of the environment have the potential to be more sample efficient than their model-free counterparts, learning to model raw observations from high dimensional sensors…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-27 Raj Ghugare , Homanga Bharadhwaj , Benjamin Eysenbach , Sergey Levine , Ruslan Salakhutdinov

In practical applications, we can rarely assume full observability of a system's environment, despite such knowledge being important for determining a reactive control system's precise interaction with its environment. Therefore, we propose…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-24 Edi Muskardin , Martin Tappler , Bernhard K. Aichernig , Ingo Pill

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has achieved state-of-the-art results in domains such as robotics and games. We build on this previous work by applying RL algorithms to a selection of canonical online stochastic optimization problems with a…

We study offline constrained reinforcement learning with general function approximation in discounted constrained Markov decision processes. Prior methods either require full data coverage for evaluating intermediate policies, lack oracle…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-13 Seokmin Ko , Ambuj Tewari , Kihyuk Hong

Traditional offline reinforcement learning (RL) methods predominantly operate in a batch-constrained setting. This confines the algorithms to a specific state-action distribution present in the dataset, reducing the effects of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-07-16 Charles A. Hepburn , Yue Jin , Giovanni Montana

We study the design of sample-efficient algorithms for reinforcement learning in the presence of rich, high-dimensional observations, formalized via the Block MDP problem. Existing algorithms suffer from either 1) computational…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-13 Zakaria Mhammedi , Dylan J. Foster , Alexander Rakhlin

This article reviews the recent advances on the statistical foundation of reinforcement learning (RL) in the offline and low-adaptive settings. We will start by arguing why offline RL is the appropriate model for almost any real-life ML…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-07 Ming Yin , Mengdi Wang , Yu-Xiang Wang