Related papers: Tightening Exploration in Upper Confidence Reinfor…
We introduce SCAL, an algorithm designed to perform efficient exploration-exploitation in any unknown weakly-communicating Markov decision process (MDP) for which an upper bound $c$ on the span of the optimal bias function is known. For an…
Constrained Reinforcement Learning (CRL) is a subset of machine learning that introduces constraints into the traditional reinforcement learning (RL) framework. Unlike conventional RL which aims solely to maximize cumulative rewards, CRL…
Continuous-time reinforcement learning (CTRL) provides a principled framework for sequential decision-making in environments where interactions evolve continuously over time. Despite its empirical success, the theoretical understanding of…
Self-play, where the algorithm learns by playing against itself without requiring any direct supervision, has become the new weapon in modern Reinforcement Learning (RL) for achieving superhuman performance in practice. However, the…
Counterfactual regret minimization (CFR) is a popular method to deal with decision-making problems of two-player zero-sum games with imperfect information. Unlike existing studies that mostly explore for solving larger scale problems or…
In many applications of Reinforcement Learning (RL), it is critically important that the algorithm performs safely, such that instantaneous hard constraints are satisfied at each step, and unsafe states and actions are avoided. However,…
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…
Achieving sample efficiency in online episodic reinforcement learning (RL) requires optimally balancing exploration and exploitation. When it comes to a finite-horizon episodic Markov decision process with $S$ states, $A$ actions and…
We present an algorithm based on the \emph{Optimism in the Face of Uncertainty} (OFU) principle which is able to learn Reinforcement Learning (RL) modeled by Markov decision process (MDP) with finite state-action space efficiently. By…
We study the online restless bandit problem, where the state of each arm evolves according to a Markov chain, and the reward of pulling an arm depends on both the pulled arm and the current state of the corresponding Markov chain. In this…
Exploration in reinforcement learning is a challenging problem: in the worst case, the agent must search for high-reward states that could be hidden anywhere in the state space. Can we define a more tractable class of RL problems, where the…
This paper proposes a learning algorithm to find a scheduling policy that achieves an optimal delay-power trade-off in communication systems. Reinforcement learning (RL) is used to minimize the expected latency for a given energy constraint…
The optimized certainty equivalent (OCE) is a family of risk measures that cover important examples such as entropic risk, conditional value-at-risk and mean-variance models. In this paper, we propose a new episodic risk-sensitive…
We consider model-free reinforcement learning (RL) in non-stationary Markov decision processes. Both the reward functions and the state transition functions are allowed to vary arbitrarily over time as long as their cumulative variations do…
Computational results demonstrate that posterior sampling for reinforcement learning (PSRL) dramatically outperforms algorithms driven by optimism, such as UCRL2. We provide insight into the extent of this performance boost and the…
Deep reinforcement learning has achieved impressive successes yet often requires a very large amount of interaction data. This result is perhaps unsurprising, as using complicated function approximation often requires more data to fit, and…
Reinforcement learning (RL) in Markov decision processes (MDPs) with large state spaces is a challenging problem. The performance of standard RL algorithms degrades drastically with the dimensionality of state space. However, in practice,…
Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a powerful method for improving the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs). Outcome-based RL, which rewards policies solely for the correctness of the final answer, yields substantial…
Optimistic algorithms have been extensively studied for regret minimization in episodic tabular MDPs, both from a minimax and an instance-dependent view. However, for the PAC RL problem, where the goal is to identify a near-optimal policy…
Heavy-tailed distributions naturally arise in several settings, from finance to telecommunications. While regret minimization under subgaussian or bounded rewards has been widely studied, learning with heavy-tailed distributions only gained…