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We study risk-sensitive reinforcement learning (RL) based on the entropic risk measure. Although existing works have established non-asymptotic regret guarantees for this problem, they leave open an exponential gap between the upper and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-09 Yingjie Fei , Zhuoran Yang , Yudong Chen , Zhaoran Wang

We analyze the Bayesian regret of the Gaussian process posterior sampling reinforcement learning (GP-PSRL) algorithm. Posterior sampling is an effective heuristic for decision-making under uncertainty that has been used to develop…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-10 Hamish Flynn , Joe Watson , Ingmar Posner , Jan Peters

We study time-inhomogeneous episodic reinforcement learning (RL) under general function approximation and sparse rewards. We design a new algorithm, Variance-weighted Optimistic $Q$-Learning (VO$Q$L), based on $Q$-learning and bound its…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-13 Alekh Agarwal , Yujia Jin , Tong Zhang

Much of the recent literature on bandit learning focuses on algorithms that aim to converge on an optimal action. One shortcoming is that this orientation does not account for time sensitivity, which can play a crucial role when learning an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-09 Daniel Russo , Benjamin Van Roy

In this paper, we propose and analyze a new method for online linear quadratic regulator (LQR) control with a priori unknown time-varying cost matrices. The cost matrices are revealed sequentially with the potential for future values to be…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-02-22 Yitian Chen , Timothy L. Molloy , Tyler Summers , Iman Shames

In reinforcement learning the Q-values summarize the expected future rewards that the agent will attain. However, they cannot capture the epistemic uncertainty about those rewards. In this work we derive a new Bellman operator with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-07 Brendan O'Donoghue

Solving Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs) is hard. Learning optimal controllers for POMDPs when the model is unknown is harder. Online learning of optimal controllers for unknown POMDPs, which requires efficient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-16 Mehdi Jafarnia-Jahromi , Rahul Jain , Ashutosh Nayyar

The generalized linear bandit framework has attracted a lot of attention in recent years by extending the well-understood linear setting and allowing to model richer reward structures. It notably covers the logistic model, widely used when…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-09 Louis Faury , Marc Abeille , Clément Calauzènes , Olivier Fercoq

Thompson sampling (TS) is widely used in sequential decision making due to its ease of use and appealing empirical performance. However, many existing analytical and empirical results for TS rely on restrictive assumptions on reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-16 Amin Karbasi , Nikki Lijing Kuang , Yi-An Ma , Siddharth Mitra

Thompson sampling is one of the most widely used algorithms for many online decision problems, due to its simplicity in implementation and superior empirical performance over other state-of-the-art methods. Despite its popularity and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-02 Tianyuan Jin , Pan Xu , Jieming Shi , Xiaokui Xiao , Quanquan Gu

Optimism in the face of uncertainty is a popular approach to balance exploration and exploitation in reinforcement learning. Here, we consider the online linear quadratic regulator (LQR) problem, i.e., to learn the LQR corresponding to an…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-04-01 Marcell Bartos , Bruce D. Lee , Lenart Treven , Andreas Krause , Florian Dörfler , Melanie N. Zeilinger

Risk-sensitive linear quadratic regulator is one of the most fundamental problems in risk-sensitive optimal control. In this paper, we study online adaptive control of risk-sensitive linear quadratic regulator in the finite horizon episodic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-14 Wenhao Xu , Xuefeng Gao , Xuedong He

In this paper, we investigate the online non-convex optimization problem which generalizes the classic {online convex optimization problem by relaxing the convexity assumption on the cost function. For this type of problem, the classic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-09-14 Lin Yang , Cheng Tan , Wing Shing Wong

In this paper, we study the problem of online sparse linear regression (OSLR) where the algorithms are restricted to accessing only $k$ out of $d$ attributes per instance for prediction, which was proved to be NP-hard. Previous work gave…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-03 Junfan Li , Shizhong Liao , Zenglin Xu , Liqiang Nie

We address the problem of sequential prediction with expert advice in a non-stationary environment with long-term memory guarantees in the sense of Bousquet and Warmuth [4]. We give a linear-time algorithm that improves on the best known…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-25 James Robinson , Mark Herbster

We study episodic reinforcement learning under unknown adversarial corruptions in both the rewards and the transition probabilities of the underlying system. We propose new algorithms which, compared to the existing results in (Lykouris et…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-09 Yifang Chen , Simon S. Du , Kevin Jamieson

We investigate the extent to which offline demonstration data can improve online learning. It is natural to expect some improvement, but the question is how, and by how much? We show that the degree of improvement must depend on the quality…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-18 Botao Hao , Rahul Jain , Tor Lattimore , Benjamin Van Roy , Zheng Wen

Stabilization of linear systems with unknown dynamics is a canonical problem in adaptive control. Since the lack of knowledge of system parameters can cause it to become destabilized, an adaptive stabilization procedure is needed prior to…

Systems and Control · Computer Science 2018-07-25 Mohamad Kazem Shirani Faradonbeh , Ambuj Tewari , George Michailidis

We address the problem of simultaneously learning and control in an online receding horizon control setting. We consider the control of an unknown linear dynamical system with general cost functions and affine constraints on the control…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-11-02 Deepan Muthirayan , Jianjun Yuan , Pramod P. Khargonekar

Existing online learning algorithms for adversarial Markov Decision Processes achieve ${O}(\sqrt{T})$ regret after $T$ rounds of interactions even if the loss functions are chosen arbitrarily by an adversary, with the caveat that the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-27 Tiancheng Jin , Junyan Liu , Chloé Rouyer , William Chang , Chen-Yu Wei , Haipeng Luo