English
Related papers

Related papers: No-Regret Exploration in Goal-Oriented Reinforceme…

200 papers

We make significant progress toward the stochastic shortest path problem with adversarial costs and unknown transition. Specifically, we develop algorithms that achieve $\widetilde{O}(\sqrt{S^2ADT_\star K})$ regret for the full-information…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-15 Liyu Chen , Haipeng Luo

We study the regret guarantee for risk-sensitive reinforcement learning (RSRL) via distributional reinforcement learning (DRL) methods. In particular, we consider finite episodic Markov decision processes whose objective is the entropic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-26 Hao Liang , Zhi-Quan Luo

We propose an algorithm that uses linear function approximation (LFA) for stochastic shortest path (SSP). Under minimal assumptions, it obtains sublinear regret, is computationally efficient, and uses stationary policies. To our knowledge,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-30 Daniel Vial , Advait Parulekar , Sanjay Shakkottai , R. Srikant

In the optimization of dynamical systems, the variables typically have constraints. Such problems can be modeled as a constrained Markov Decision Process (CMDP). This paper considers a model-free approach to the problem, where the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-02 Qinbo Bai , Vaneet Aggarwal , Ather Gattami

In this paper, we propose Posterior Sampling Reinforcement Learning for Zero-sum Stochastic Games (PSRL-ZSG), the first online learning algorithm that achieves Bayesian regret bound of $O(HS\sqrt{AT})$ in the infinite-horizon zero-sum…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-12 Mehdi Jafarnia-Jahromi , Rahul Jain , Ashutosh Nayyar

We consider the problem of online learning in Linear Quadratic Control systems whose state transition and state-action transition matrices $A$ and $B$ may be initially unknown. We devise an online learning algorithm and provide guarantees…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-30 Yassir Jedra , Alexandre Proutiere

Most provably-efficient learning algorithms introduce optimism about poorly-understood states and actions to encourage exploration. We study an alternative approach for efficient exploration, posterior sampling for reinforcement learning…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2013-12-30 Ian Osband , Daniel Russo , Benjamin Van Roy

Sequential optimization of black-box functions from noisy evaluations has been widely studied, with Gaussian Process bandit algorithms such as GP-UCB guaranteeing no-regret in stationary settings. However, for time-varying objectives, it is…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-12-04 Eliabelle Mauduit , Eloïse Berthier , Andrea Simonetto

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-16 Antoine Moulin , Gergely Neu , Luca Viano

We consider stochastic bandit problems with a continuous set of arms and where the expected reward is a continuous and unimodal function of the arm. No further assumption is made regarding the smoothness and the structure of the expected…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-03-09 Richard Combes , Alexandre Proutiere

We study the problem of reinforcement learning (RL) with low (policy) switching cost - a problem well-motivated by real-life RL applications in which deployments of new policies are costly and the number of policy updates must be low. In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-07 Dan Qiao , Ming Yin , Ming Min , Yu-Xiang Wang

This paper investigates the challenges of optimal online policy learning under missing data. State-of-the-art algorithms implicitly assume that rewards are always observable. I show that when rewards are missing at random, the Upper…

Econometrics · Economics 2025-07-29 Filippo Palomba

This work addresses the problem of regret minimization in non-stochastic multi-armed bandit problems, focusing on performance guarantees that hold with high probability. Such results are rather scarce in the literature since proving them…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-11-04 Gergely Neu

While quantum reinforcement learning (RL) has attracted a surge of attention recently, its theoretical understanding is limited. In particular, it remains elusive how to design provably efficient quantum RL algorithms that can address the…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2024-06-14 Han Zhong , Jiachen Hu , Yecheng Xue , Tongyang Li , Liwei Wang

We study the constant regret guarantees in reinforcement learning (RL). Our objective is to design an algorithm that incurs only finite regret over infinite episodes with high probability. We introduce an algorithm, Cert-LSVI-UCB, for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-13 Weitong Zhang , Zhiyuan Fan , Jiafan He , Quanquan Gu

We study the problem of infinite-horizon average-reward reinforcement learning with linear Markov decision processes (MDPs). The associated Bellman operator of the problem not being a contraction makes the algorithm design challenging.…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-03-12 Kihyuk Hong , Woojin Chae , Yufan Zhang , Dabeen Lee , Ambuj Tewari

We study online decision making problems under resource constraints, where both reward and cost functions are drawn from distributions that may change adversarially over time. We focus on two canonical settings: $(i)$ online resource…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-19 Francesco Emanuele Stradi , Matteo Castiglioni , Alberto Marchesi , Nicola Gatti , Christian Kroer

In this paper we consider multi-objective reinforcement learning where the objectives are balanced using preferences. In practice, the preferences are often given in an adversarial manner, e.g., customers can be picky in many applications.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-29 Jingfeng Wu , Vladimir Braverman , Lin F. Yang

This paper investigates conservative exploration in reinforcement learning where the performance of the learning agent is guaranteed to be above a certain threshold throughout the learning process. It focuses on the tabular episodic Markov…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-14 Donghao Li , Ruiquan Huang , Cong Shen , Jing Yang

Reinforcement learning (RL) so far has limited real-world applications. One key challenge is that typical RL algorithms heavily rely on a reset mechanism to sample proper initial states; these reset mechanisms, in practice, are expensive to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-25 Hoai-An Nguyen , Ching-An Cheng