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Related papers: Kernel-Based Reinforcement Learning: A Finite-Time…

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The classical theory of reinforcement learning (RL) has focused on tabular and linear representations of value functions. Further progress hinges on combining RL with modern function approximators such as kernel functions and deep neural…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-01 Zhuoran Yang , Chi Jin , Zhaoran Wang , Mengdi Wang , Michael I. Jordan

We study reinforcement learning in an infinite-horizon average-reward setting with linear function approximation, where the transition probability function of the underlying Markov Decision Process (MDP) admits a linear form over a feature…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-11 Yue Wu , Dongruo Zhou , Quanquan Gu

We derive instance-dependent tail bounds for the regret of optimism-based reinforcement learning in finite-horizon tabular Markov decision processes with unknown transition dynamics. We first study a UCBVI-type (model-based) algorithm and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-18 Sajad Khodadadian , Mehrdad Moharrami

State-of-the-art efficient model-based Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms typically act by iteratively solving empirical models, i.e., by performing \emph{full-planning} on Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) built by the gathered…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-01 Yonathan Efroni , Nadav Merlis , Mohammad Ghavamzadeh , Shie Mannor

We propose the Bayes-UCBVI algorithm for reinforcement learning in tabular, stage-dependent, episodic Markov decision process: a natural extension of the Bayes-UCB algorithm by Kaufmann et al. (2012) for multi-armed bandits. Our method uses…

We present a new algorithm based on posterior sampling for learning in Constrained Markov Decision Processes (CMDP) in the infinite-horizon undiscounted setting. The algorithm achieves near-optimal regret bounds while being advantageous…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-30 Danil Provodin , Maurits Kaptein , Mykola Pechenizkiy

The problem of reinforcement learning in an unknown and discrete Markov Decision Process (MDP) under the average-reward criterion is considered, when the learner interacts with the system in a single stream of observations, starting from an…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-03-06 Mohammad Sadegh Talebi , Odalric-Ambrym Maillard

We study a generalization of the problem of online learning in adversarial linear contextual bandits by incorporating loss functions that belong to a reproducing kernel Hilbert space, which allows for a more flexible modeling of complex…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-10-04 Gergely Neu , Julia Olkhovskaya , Sattar Vakili

We develop a probabilistic framework for analysing model-based reinforcement learning in the episodic setting. We then apply it to study finite-time horizon stochastic control problems with linear dynamics but unknown coefficients and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-22 Lukasz Szpruch , Tanut Treetanthiploet , Yufei Zhang

This paper is concerned with offline reinforcement learning (RL), which learns using pre-collected data without further exploration. Effective offline RL would be able to accommodate distribution shift and limited data coverage. However,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-03-11 Gen Li , Laixi Shi , Yuxin Chen , Yuejie Chi , Yuting Wei

A central issue lying at the heart of online reinforcement learning (RL) is data efficiency. While a number of recent works achieved asymptotically minimal regret in online RL, the optimality of these results is only guaranteed in a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-30 Zihan Zhang , Yuxin Chen , Jason D. Lee , Simon S. Du

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-26 Wang Chi Cheung , David Simchi-Levi , Ruihao Zhu

A recent line of works showed regret bounds in reinforcement learning (RL) can be (nearly) independent of planning horizon, a.k.a.~the horizon-free bounds. However, these regret bounds only apply to settings where a polynomial dependency on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-19 Zihan Zhang , Jason D. Lee , Yuxin Chen , Simon S. Du

We consider the maximum causal entropy inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) problem for infinite-horizon stationary mean-field games (MFG), in which we model the unknown reward function within a reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS). This…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-06 Berkay Anahtarci , Can Deha Kariksiz , Naci Saldi

We study fine-grained gap-dependent regret bounds for model-free reinforcement learning in episodic tabular Markov Decision Processes. Existing model-free algorithms achieve minimax worst-case regret, but their gap-dependent bounds remain…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-10-09 Haochen Zhang , Zhong Zheng , Lingzhou Xue

Modern tasks in reinforcement learning have large state and action spaces. To deal with them efficiently, one often uses predefined feature mapping to represent states and actions in a low-dimensional space. In this paper, we study…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-24 Dongruo Zhou , Jiafan He , Quanquan Gu

Model-free reinforcement learning is known to be memory and computation efficient and more amendable to large scale problems. In this paper, two model-free algorithms are introduced for learning infinite-horizon average-reward Markov…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-26 Chen-Yu Wei , Mehdi Jafarnia-Jahromi , Haipeng Luo , Hiteshi Sharma , Rahul Jain

This paper gives the first polynomial-time algorithm for tabular Markov Decision Processes (MDP) that enjoys a regret bound \emph{independent on the planning horizon}. Specifically, we consider tabular MDP with $S$ states, $A$ actions, a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-17 Zihan Zhang , Xiangyang Ji , Simon S. Du

We study reward-free reinforcement learning (RL) with linear function approximation, where the agent works in two phases: (1) in the exploration phase, the agent interacts with the environment but cannot access the reward; and (2) in the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-15 Junkai Zhang , Weitong Zhang , Quanquan Gu

We study the regret minimization problem in the novel setting of generalized kernelized bandits (GKBs), where we optimize an unknown function $f^*$ belonging to a reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS) having access to samples generated by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-12 Alberto Maria Metelli , Simone Drago , Marco Mussi