Related papers: The Effect of Q-function Reuse on the Total Regret…

Model-free reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms, such as Q-learning, directly parameterize and update value functions or policies without explicitly modeling the environment. They are typically simpler, more flexible to use, and thus more…

This work extends the analysis of the theoretical results presented within the paper Is Q-Learning Provably Efficient? by Jin et al. We include a survey of related research to contextualize the need for strengthening the theoretical…

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…

A fundamental question in reinforcement learning is whether model-free algorithms are sample efficient. Recently, Jin et al. \cite{jin2018q} proposed a Q-learning algorithm with UCB exploration policy, and proved it has nearly optimal…

The development of machine learning algorithms has been gathering relevance to address the increasing modelling complexity of manufacturing decision-making problems. Reinforcement learning is a methodology with great potential due to the…

Artificial neural networks are promising for general function approximation but challenging to train on non-independent or non-identically distributed data due to catastrophic forgetting. The experience replay buffer, a standard component…

We study the gap-dependent bounds of two important algorithms for on-policy Q-learning for finite-horizon episodic tabular Markov Decision Processes (MDPs): UCB-Advantage (Zhang et al. 2020) and Q-EarlySettled-Advantage (Li et al. 2021).…

Model-free reinforcement learning has been successfully applied to a range of challenging problems, and has recently been extended to handle large neural network policies and value functions. However, the sample complexity of model-free…

Motivated by the episodic version of the classical inventory control problem, we propose a new Q-learning-based algorithm, Elimination-Based Half-Q-Learning (HQL), that enjoys improved efficiency over existing algorithms for a wide variety…

Many practical reinforcement learning environments have a discrete factored action space that induces a large combinatorial set of actions, thereby posing significant challenges. Existing approaches leverage the regular structure of the…

We study the reinforcement learning problem in the setting of finite-horizon episodic Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) with $S$ states, $A$ actions, and episode length $H$. We propose a model-free algorithm UCB-Advantage and prove that it…

To bridge the gap between empirical success and theoretical understanding in transfer reinforcement learning (RL), we study a principled approach with provable performance guarantees. We introduce a novel composite MDP framework where…

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…

We study the Non-Stationary Reinforcement Learning (RL) under distribution shifts in both finite-horizon episodic and infinite-horizon discounted Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). In the finite-horizon case, the transition functions may…

We consider the question of learning $Q$-function in a sample efficient manner for reinforcement learning with continuous state and action spaces under a generative model. If $Q$-function is Lipschitz continuous, then the minimal sample…

In this paper, we consider model-free federated reinforcement learning for tabular episodic Markov decision processes. Under the coordination of a central server, multiple agents collaboratively explore the environment and learn an optimal…

In an episodic Markov Decision Process (MDP) problem, an online algorithm chooses from a set of actions in a sequence of $H$ trials, where $H$ is the episode length, in order to maximize the total payoff of the chosen actions. Q-learning,…

Q-learning is a popular Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithm which is widely used in practice with function approximation (Mnih et al., 2015). In contrast, existing theoretical results are pessimistic about Q-learning. For example, (Baird,…

Q-learning is one of the most popular methods in Reinforcement Learning (RL). Transfer Learning aims to utilize the learned knowledge from source tasks to help new tasks to improve the sample complexity of the new tasks. Considering that…

In this paper, we propose a new solution to reward adaptation (RA) in reinforcement learning, where the agent adapts to a target reward function based on one or more existing source behaviors learned a priori under the same domain dynamics…