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In many real-world settings, reinforcement learning systems suffer performance degradation when the environment encountered at deployment differs from that observed during training. Distributionally robust reinforcement learning (DR-RL)…
In this paper, we revisit the regret of undiscounted reinforcement learning in MDPs with a birth and death structure. Specifically, we consider a controlled queue with impatient jobs and the main objective is to optimize a trade-off between…
We consider un-discounted reinforcement learning (RL) in Markov decision processes (MDPs) under drifting non-stationarity, i.e., both the reward and state transition distributions are allowed to evolve over time, as long as their respective…
Compositional generalization in sequential decision-making requires identifying which parts of prior rollouts remain useful for new tasks. Existing methods reuse skills or predictive models, but often overlook rich local transition geometry…
We consider un-discounted reinforcement learning (RL) in Markov decision processes (MDPs) under temporal drifts, ie, both the reward and state transition distributions are allowed to evolve over time, as long as their respective total…
Reinforcement learning (RL) is an innovative approach to financial decision making, offering specialized solutions to complex investment problems where traditional methods fail. This review analyzes 167 articles from 2017--2025, focusing on…
Regret bounds in online learning compare the player's performance to $L^*$, the optimal performance in hindsight with a fixed strategy. Typically such bounds scale with the square root of the time horizon $T$. The more refined concept of…
We study the problem of representation learning in stochastic contextual linear bandits. While the primary concern in this domain is usually to find realizable representations (i.e., those that allow predicting the reward function at any…
We study the multinomial logit (MNL) contextual bandit problem for sequential assortment selection. Although most existing research assumes utility functions to be linear in item features, this linearity assumption restricts the modeling of…
Exploration is widely regarded as one of the most challenging aspects of reinforcement learning (RL), with many naive approaches succumbing to exponential sample complexity. To isolate the challenges of exploration, we propose a new…
We are interested in a framework of online learning with kernels for low-dimensional but large-scale and potentially adversarial datasets. We study the computational and theoretical performance of online variations of kernel Ridge…
Follow-the-Regularized-Leader (FTRL) algorithms are a popular class of learning algorithms for online linear optimization (OLO) that guarantee sub-linear regret, but the choice of regularizer can significantly impact dimension-dependent…
This paper provides a theoretical study of deep neural function approximation in reinforcement learning (RL) with the $\epsilon$-greedy exploration under the online setting. This problem setting is motivated by the successful deep…
In real world settings, numerous constraints are present which are hard to specify mathematically. However, for the real world deployment of reinforcement learning (RL), it is critical that RL agents are aware of these constraints, so that…
We study the model-based undiscounted reinforcement learning for partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs). The oracle we consider is the optimal policy of the POMDP with a known environment in terms of the average reward over…
Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) replaces hard-to-specify rewards with pairwise trajectory preferences, yet regret-oriented theory often assumes that preference labels are generated consistently from a single ground-truth…
Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) policies have been shown to be vulnerable to small adversarial noise in observations. Such adversarial noise can have disastrous consequences in safety-critical environments. For instance, a self-driving…
A fundamental question in the theory of reinforcement learning is: suppose the optimal $Q$-function lies in the linear span of a given $d$ dimensional feature mapping, is sample-efficient reinforcement learning (RL) possible? The recent and…
We study infinite-horizon average-reward reinforcement learning (RL) for Lipschitz MDPs, a broad class that subsumes several important classes such as linear and RKHS MDPs, function approximation frameworks, and develop an adaptive…
In standard RL, a learner attempts to learn an optimal policy for a Markov Decision Process whose structure (e.g. state space) is known. In online model selection, a learner attempts to learn an optimal policy for an MDP knowing only that…