Related papers: Randomized Exploration for Reinforcement Learning …
We study reinforcement learning (RL) with linear function approximation. For episodic time-inhomogeneous linear Markov decision processes (linear MDPs) whose transition probability can be parameterized as a linear function of a given…
We consider the problem of learning the optimal policy for Markov decision processes with safety constraints. We formulate the problem in a reach-avoid setup. Our goal is to design online reinforcement learning algorithms that ensure safety…
Policy optimization methods are one of the most widely used classes of Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms. Yet, so far, such methods have been mostly analyzed from an optimization perspective, without addressing the problem of…
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…
Linear temporal logic (LTL) is a powerful language for task specification in reinforcement learning, as it allows describing objectives beyond the expressivity of conventional discounted return formulations. Nonetheless, recent works have…
Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) improves LLM reasoning, yet growing evidence indicates an exploration ceiling: it often reweights existing solution traces rather than discovering new strategies, limiting gains under…
The Reward-Biased Maximum Likelihood Estimate (RBMLE) for adaptive control of Markov chains was proposed to overcome the central obstacle of what is variously called the fundamental "closed-identifiability problem" of adaptive control, the…
We present an iterative inverse reinforcement learning algorithm to infer optimal cost functions in continuous spaces. Based on a popular maximum entropy criteria, our approach iteratively finds a weight improvement step and proposes a…
We study reinforcement learning (RL) for a class of continuous-time linear-quadratic (LQ) control problems for diffusions, where states are scalar-valued and running control rewards are absent but volatilities of the state processes depend…
Reward design remains a significant bottleneck in applying reinforcement learning (RL) to real-world problems. A popular alternative is reward learning, where reward functions are inferred from human feedback rather than manually specified.…
In this paper, we study risk-sensitive Reinforcement Learning (RL), focusing on the objective of Conditional Value at Risk (CVaR) with risk tolerance $\tau$. Starting with multi-arm bandits (MABs), we show the minimax CVaR regret rate is…
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…
Optimistic exploration is central to improving sample efficiency in reinforcement learning with human feedback, yet existing exploratory bonus methods to incentivize exploration often fail to realize optimism. We provide a theoretical…
To tackle long planning horizon problems in reinforcement learning with general function approximation, we propose the first algorithm, termed as UCRL-WVTR, that achieves both \emph{horizon-free} and \emph{instance-dependent}, since it…
We study the reward-free reinforcement learning framework, which is particularly suitable for batch reinforcement learning and scenarios where one needs policies for multiple reward functions. This framework has two phases. In the…
Myopic exploration policies such as epsilon-greedy, softmax, or Gaussian noise fail to explore efficiently in some reinforcement learning tasks and yet, they perform well in many others. In fact, in practice, they are often selected as the…
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…
Balancing exploration and exploitation is a fundamental part of reinforcement learning, yet most state-of-the-art algorithms use a naive exploration protocol like $\epsilon$-greedy. This contributes to the problem of high sample complexity,…
We consider the problem of interactive decision making, encompassing structured bandits and reinforcement learning with general function approximation. Recently, Foster et al. (2021) introduced the Decision-Estimation Coefficient, a measure…
Research in reinforcement learning has produced algorithms for optimal decision making under uncertainty that fall within two main types. The first employs a Bayesian framework, where optimality improves with increased computational time.…