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Large language models (LLMs) have shown promise as interactive agents that solve tasks through extended sequences of environment interactions. While prior work has primarily focused on system-level optimizations or algorithmic improvements,…
The Robust Markov Decision Process (RMDP) framework focuses on designing control policies that are robust against the parameter uncertainties due to the mismatches between the simulator model and real-world settings. An RMDP problem is…
In this work, we study the scalability of offline reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms. In principle, a truly scalable offline RL algorithm should be able to solve any given problem, regardless of its complexity, given sufficient data,…
One of the key approaches to save samples in reinforcement learning (RL) is to use knowledge from an approximate model such as its simulator. However, how much does an approximate model help to learn a near-optimal policy of the true…
Offline Reinforcement Learning (RL) aims to learn a near-optimal policy from a fixed dataset of transitions collected by another policy. This problem has attracted a lot of attention recently, but most existing methods with strong…
When data is scarce or mistakes are costly, average-case metrics fall short. What a practitioner needs is a guarantee: with probability at least $1-\delta$, the learned policy is $\varepsilon$-close to optimal after $N$ episodes. This is…
Reinforcement learning (RL) theory has largely focused on proving minimax sample complexity bounds. These require strategic exploration algorithms that use relatively limited function classes for representing the policy or value function.…
We develop several provably efficient model-free reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms for infinite-horizon average-reward Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). We consider both online setting and the setting with access to a simulator. In the…
Reinforcement Learning algorithms that learn from human feedback (RLHF) need to be efficient in terms of statistical complexity, computational complexity, and query complexity. In this work, we consider the RLHF setting where the feedback…
We consider model-free reinforcement learning for infinite-horizon discounted Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) with a continuous state space and unknown transition kernel, when only a single sample path under an arbitrary policy of the…
Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) denotes a powerful family of algorithms for recovering a reward function justifying the behavior demonstrated by an expert agent. A well-known limitation of IRL is the ambiguity in the choice of the…
We study the sample complexity of model-based reinforcement learning (henceforth RL) in general contextual decision processes that require strategic exploration to find a near-optimal policy. We design new algorithms for RL with a generic…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) has demonstrated tremendous empirical success across numerous challenging domains. However, we lack a strong theoretical understanding of the statistical complexity of RL in environments with large state spaces,…
We study the problem of agnostic PAC reinforcement learning (RL): given a policy class $\Pi$, how many rounds of interaction with an unknown MDP (with a potentially large state and action space) are required to learn an…
We study the problem of learning optimal policies in finite-horizon Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) using low-rank reinforcement learning (RL) methods. In finite-horizon MDPs, the policies, and therefore the value functions (VFs) are not…
We consider the problem of learning a control policy that is robust against the parameter mismatches between the training environment and testing environment. We formulate this as a distributionally robust reinforcement learning (DR-RL)…
We consider the problem of learning an $\varepsilon$-optimal policy in a general class of continuous-space Markov decision processes (MDPs) having smooth Bellman operators. Given access to a generative model, we achieve rate-optimal sample…
Replicability is a fundamental challenge in reinforcement learning (RL), as RL algorithms are empirically observed to be unstable and sensitive to variations in training conditions. To formally address this issue, we study \emph{list…
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…
We study the reinforcement learning (RL) problem in a constrained Markov decision process (CMDP), where an agent explores the environment to maximize the expected cumulative reward while satisfying a single constraint on the expected total…