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One of the challenges in online reinforcement learning (RL) is that the agent needs to trade off the exploration of the environment and the exploitation of the samples to optimize its behavior. Whether we optimize for regret, sample…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-19 Jean Tarbouriech , Matteo Pirotta , Michal Valko , Alessandro Lazaric

We investigate the problem of best-policy identification in discounted Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) when the learner has access to a generative model. The objective is to devise a learning algorithm returning the best policy as early as…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-05-11 Aymen Al Marjani , Alexandre Proutiere

Reward-free reinforcement learning (RL) considers the setting where the agent does not have access to a reward function during exploration, but must propose a near-optimal policy for an arbitrary reward function revealed only after…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-22 Andrew Wagenmaker , Yifang Chen , Max Simchowitz , Simon S. Du , Kevin Jamieson

We study the model-based reward-free reinforcement learning with linear function approximation for episodic Markov decision processes (MDPs). In this setting, the agent works in two phases. In the exploration phase, the agent interacts with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-03 Weitong Zhang , Dongruo Zhou , Quanquan Gu

We consider discounted infinite-horizon constrained Markov decision processes (CMDPs), where the goal is to find an optimal policy that maximizes the expected cumulative reward while satisfying expected cumulative constraints. Motivated by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Tingting Ni , Maryam Kamgarpour

Targeted and deliberate exploration of state--action pairs is essential in reward-free Markov Decision Problems (MDPs). More precisely, different state-action pairs exhibit different degree of importance or difficulty which must be actively…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-21 Xihe Gu , Urbashi Mitra , Tara Javidi

We resolve the open question regarding the sample complexity of policy learning for maximizing the long-run average reward associated with a uniformly ergodic Markov decision process (MDP), assuming a generative model. In this context, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-14 Shengbo Wang , Jose Blanchet , Peter Glynn

In this paper we provide faster algorithms for approximately solving discounted Markov Decision Processes in multiple parameter regimes. Given a discounted Markov Decision Process (DMDP) with $|S|$ states, $|A|$ actions, discount factor…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2020-12-24 Aaron Sidford , Mengdi Wang , Xian Wu , Yinyu Ye

This paper addresses the challenge of solving Constrained Markov Decision Processes (CMDPs) with $d > 1$ constraints when the transition dynamics are unknown, but samples can be drawn from a generative model. We propose a model-based…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-11 Max Buckley , Konstantinos Papathanasiou , Andreas Spanopoulos

This paper presents a novel form of policy gradient for model-free reinforcement learning (RL) with improved exploration properties. Current policy-based methods use entropy regularization to encourage undirected exploration of the reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-03-17 Ofir Nachum , Mohammad Norouzi , Dale Schuurmans

Reward-free exploration is a reinforcement learning setting studied by Jin et al. (2020), who address it by running several algorithms with regret guarantees in parallel. In our work, we instead give a more natural adaptive approach for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-08 Emilie Kaufmann , Pierre Ménard , Omar Darwiche Domingues , Anders Jonsson , Edouard Leurent , Michal Valko

We prove new upper and lower bounds for sample complexity of finding an $\epsilon$-optimal policy of an infinite-horizon average-reward Markov decision process (MDP) given access to a generative model. When the mixing time of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-15 Yujia Jin , Aaron Sidford

Mastering deep reinforcement learning (DRL) proves challenging in tasks featuring scant rewards. These limited rewards merely signify whether the task is partially or entirely accomplished, necessitating various exploration actions before…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-11 Guojian Wang , Faguo Wu , Xiao Zhang

In the field of unsupervised skill discovery (USD), a major challenge is limited exploration, primarily due to substantial penalties when skills deviate from their initial trajectories. To enhance exploration, recent methodologies employ…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-02 Hyunseung Kim , Byungkun Lee , Hojoon Lee , Dongyoon Hwang , Sejik Park , Kyushik Min , Jaegul Choo

The exploration-exploitation dilemma in reinforcement learning (RL) is a fundamental challenge to efficient RL algorithms. Existing algorithms for finite state and action discounted RL problems address this by assuming sufficient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-09 Caleb Ju , Guanghui Lan

Effective exploration is a key challenge in reinforcement learning for large language models: discovering high-quality trajectories within a limited sampling budget from the vast natural language sequence space. Existing methods face…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Yiran Guo , Zhongjian Qiao , Yingqi Xie , Jie Liu , Dan Ye , Ruiqing Zhang , Shuang Qiu , Lijie Xu

This work considers the sample complexity of obtaining an $\varepsilon$-optimal policy in an average reward Markov Decision Process (AMDP), given access to a generative model (simulator). When the ground-truth MDP is weakly communicating,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-02 Jinghan Wang , Mengdi Wang , Lin F. Yang

The process of discovery requires active exploration -- the act of collecting new and informative data. However, efficient autonomous exploration remains a major unsolved problem. The dominant paradigm addresses this challenge by using…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Zakaria Mhammedi , James Cohan

Exploration is a major challenge in reinforcement learning, especially for high-dimensional domains that require function approximation. We propose exploration objectives -- policy optimization objectives that enable downstream maximization…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-06 Philip Amortila , Dylan J. Foster , Akshay Krishnamurthy

Offline reinforcement learning aims to learn from pre-collected datasets without active exploration. This problem faces significant challenges, including limited data availability and distributional shifts. Existing approaches adopt a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-01 Yue Wang , Jinjun Xiong , Shaofeng Zou