Related papers: Randomized Exploration for Reinforcement Learning …
We study the problem of exploration in Reinforcement Learning and present a novel model-free solution. We adopt an information-theoretical viewpoint and start from the instance-specific lower bound of the number of samples that have to be…
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…
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…
This paper presents a novel model-free Reinforcement Learning algorithm for learning behavior in continuous action, state, and goal spaces. The algorithm approximates optimal value functions using non-parametric estimators. It is able to…
In this paper, we propose and study opportunistic reinforcement learning - a new variant of reinforcement learning problems where the regret of selecting a suboptimal action varies under an external environmental condition known as the…
We propose and study a new model for reinforcement learning with rich observations, generalizing contextual bandits to sequential decision making. These models require an agent to take actions based on observations (features) with the goal…
Conveying complex objectives to reinforcement learning (RL) agents often requires meticulous reward engineering. Preference-based RL methods are able to learn a more flexible reward model based on human preferences by actively incorporating…
Policy evaluation is an important instrument for the comparison of different algorithms in Reinforcement Learning (RL). However, even a precise knowledge of the value function $V^{\pi}$ corresponding to a policy $\pi$ does not provide…
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…
In this paper, we study the problem of regret minimization for episodic Reinforcement Learning (RL) both in the model-free and the model-based setting. We focus on learning with general function classes and general model classes, and we…
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…
Safety in reinforcement learning has become increasingly important in recent years. Yet, existing solutions either fail to strictly avoid choosing unsafe actions, which may lead to catastrophic results in safety-critical systems, or fail to…
We study algorithms for average-cost reinforcement learning problems with value function approximation. Our starting point is the recently proposed POLITEX algorithm, a version of policy iteration where the policy produced in each iteration…
We consider online reinforcement learning in episodic Markov decision process (MDP) with unknown transition function and stochastic rewards drawn from some fixed but unknown distribution. The learner aims to learn the optimal policy and…
Reinforcement learning (RL) has shown empirical success in various real world settings with complex models and large state-action spaces. The existing analytical results, however, typically focus on settings with a small number of…
In this paper, we revisit the regret minimization problem in sparse stochastic contextual linear bandits, where feature vectors may be of large dimension $d$, but where the reward function depends on a few, say $s_0\ll d$, of these features…
Intrinsic rewards play a central role in handling the exploration-exploitation trade-off when designing sequential decision-making algorithms, in both foundational theory and state-of-the-art deep reinforcement learning. The LinUCB…
This paper studies safe Reinforcement Learning (safe RL) with linear function approximation and under hard instantaneous constraints where unsafe actions must be avoided at each step. Existing studies have considered safe RL with hard…
Optimistic initialisation is an effective strategy for efficient exploration in reinforcement learning (RL). In the tabular case, all provably efficient model-free algorithms rely on it. However, model-free deep RL algorithms do not use…
Reward-free reinforcement learning (RL) is a framework which is suitable for both the batch RL setting and the setting where there are many reward functions of interest. During the exploration phase, an agent collects samples without using…