Related papers: When Simple Exploration is Sample Efficient: Ident…
We study the exploration problem with approximate linear action-value functions in episodic reinforcement learning under the notion of low inherent Bellman error, a condition normally employed to show convergence of approximate value…
The theory of reinforcement learning has focused on two fundamental problems: achieving low regret, and identifying $\epsilon$-optimal policies. While a simple reduction allows one to apply a low-regret algorithm to obtain an…
In order to mitigate the sample complexity of real-world reinforcement learning, common practice is to first train a policy in a simulator where samples are cheap, and then deploy this policy in the real world, with the hope that it…
There has been growing progress on theoretical analyses for provably efficient learning in MDPs with linear function approximation, but much of the existing work has made strong assumptions to enable exploration by conventional exploration…
In online reinforcement learning, data scarcity creates epistemic uncertainty that makes robustness important early in learning, whereas sufficient exploration is needed to learn the true-environment optimal policy. We study this…
Existing exploration strategies in reinforcement learning (RL) often either ignore the history or feedback of search, or are complicated to implement. There is also a very limited literature showing their effectiveness over diverse domains.…
Realistic environments often provide agents with very limited feedback. When the environment is initially unknown, the feedback, in the beginning, can be completely absent, and the agents may first choose to devote all their effort on…
In the era of deep reinforcement learning, making progress is more complex, as the collected experience must be compressed into a deep model for future exploitation and sampling. Many papers have shown that training a deep learning policy…
Meta-reinforcement learning (meta-RL) is a promising framework for tackling challenging domains requiring efficient exploration. Existing meta-RL algorithms are characterized by low sample efficiency, and mostly focus on low-dimensional…
Exogenous MDPs (Exo-MDPs) capture sequential decision-making where uncertainty comes solely from exogenous inputs that evolve independently of the learner's actions. This structure is especially common in operations research applications…
In this paper, we consider the low rank structure of the reward sequence of the pure exploration problems. Firstly, we propose the separated setting in pure exploration problem, where the exploration strategy cannot receive the feedback of…
In constrained reinforcement learning (RL), a learning agent seeks to not only optimize the overall reward but also satisfy the additional safety, diversity, or budget constraints. Consequently, existing constrained RL solutions require…
Several recent works have proposed instance-dependent upper bounds on the number of episodes needed to identify, with probability $1-\delta$, an $\varepsilon$-optimal policy in finite-horizon tabular Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). These…
Bayesian model-based reinforcement learning is a formally elegant approach to learning optimal behaviour under model uncertainty, trading off exploration and exploitation in an ideal way. Unfortunately, finding the resulting Bayes-optimal…
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…
Balancing exploration and exploitation is a central goal in reinforcement learning (RL). Despite recent advances in enhancing large language model (LLM) reasoning, most methods lean toward exploitation, and increasingly encounter…
Coverage conditions -- which assert that the data logging distribution adequately covers the state space -- play a fundamental role in determining the sample complexity of offline reinforcement learning. While such conditions might seem…
How do you incentivize self-interested agents to $\textit{explore}$ when they prefer to $\textit{exploit}$? We consider complex exploration problems, where each agent faces the same (but unknown) MDP. In contrast with traditional…
Reinforcement learning (RL) and Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL), in particular, have the potential to disrupt and are already changing the way we interact with the world. One of the key indicators of their applicability is their ability…
While many classical notions of learnability (e.g., PAC learnability) are distribution-free, utilizing the specific structures of an input distribution may improve learning performance. For example, a product distribution on a…