English
Related papers

Related papers: Exploration-exploitation trade-off for continuous-…

200 papers

While learning in an unknown Markov Decision Process (MDP), an agent should trade off exploration to discover new information about the MDP, and exploitation of the current knowledge to maximize the reward. Although the agent will…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-16 Evrard Garcelon , Mohammad Ghavamzadeh , Alessandro Lazaric , Matteo Pirotta

Reward-free exploration is a reinforcement learning setting studied by Jin et al. (2020), who address it by running several algorithms with regret guarantees in parallel. In our work, we instead give a more natural adaptive approach for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-08 Emilie Kaufmann , Pierre Ménard , Omar Darwiche Domingues , Anders Jonsson , Edouard Leurent , Michal Valko

This paper studies the online optimal control problem with time-varying convex stage costs for a time-invariant linear dynamical system, where a finite lookahead window of accurate predictions of the stage costs are available at each time.…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-10-23 Yingying Li , Xin Chen , Na Li

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) replaces hard-to-specify rewards with pairwise trajectory preferences, yet regret-oriented theory often assumes that preference labels are generated consistently from a single ground-truth…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-03 Ming Shi , Yingbin Liang , Ness B. Shroff , Ananthram Swami

The exploration/exploitation trade-off is an inherent challenge in data-driven adaptive control. Though this trade-off has been studied for multi-armed bandits (MAB's) and reinforcement learning for linear systems; it is less well-studied…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-01-30 Ilgin Dogan , Zuo-Jun Max Shen , Anil Aswani

The stochastic multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem is one of the most fundamental models in sequential decision-making, with the core challenge being the trade-off between exploration and exploitation. Although algorithms such as Upper…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-13 Di Zhang

This paper proposes a computationally tractable algorithm for learning infinite-horizon average-reward linear Markov decision processes (MDPs) and linear mixture MDPs under the Bellman optimality condition. While guaranteeing computational…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-25 Woojin Chae , Dabeen Lee

The stochastic multi-armed bandit problem is a well-known model for studying the exploration-exploitation trade-off. It has significant possible applications in adaptive clinical trials, which allow for dynamic changes in the treatment…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-11 Hossein Aboutalebi , Doina Precup , Tibor Schuster

We propose a novel constrained reinforcement learning method for finding optimal policies in Markov Decision Processes while satisfying temporal logic constraints with a desired probability throughout the learning process. An…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-09-07 Derya Aksaray , Yasin Yazicioglu , Ahmet Semi Asarkaya

We study reinforcement learning with multinomial logistic (MNL) function approximation where the underlying transition probability kernel of the Markov decision processes (MDPs) is parametrized by an unknown transition core with features of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-11-01 Wooseong Cho , Taehyun Hwang , Joongkyu Lee , Min-hwan Oh

Episodic self-imitation learning, a novel self-imitation algorithm with a trajectory selection module and an adaptive loss function, is proposed to speed up reinforcement learning. Compared to the original self-imitation learning algorithm,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-11-30 Tianhong Dai , Hengyan Liu , Anil Anthony Bharath

In the optimization of dynamical systems, the variables typically have constraints. Such problems can be modeled as a constrained Markov Decision Process (CMDP). This paper considers a model-free approach to the problem, where the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-02 Qinbo Bai , Vaneet Aggarwal , Ather Gattami

We propose an algorithm for tabular episodic reinforcement learning with constraints. We provide a modular analysis with strong theoretical guarantees for settings with concave rewards and convex constraints, and for settings with hard…

A fundamental question in reinforcement learning theory is: suppose the optimal value functions are linear in given features, can we learn them efficiently? This problem's counterpart in supervised learning, linear regression, can be solved…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-28 Daniel Kane , Sihan Liu , Shachar Lovett , Gaurav Mahajan , Csaba Szepesvári , Gellért Weisz

We consider the exploration-exploitation dilemma in finite-horizon reinforcement learning problems whose state-action space is endowed with a metric. We introduce Kernel-UCBVI, a model-based optimistic algorithm that leverages the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-25 Omar Darwiche Domingues , Pierre Ménard , Matteo Pirotta , Emilie Kaufmann , Michal Valko

In this paper, we will deal with a Linear Quadratic Optimal Control problem with unknown dynamics. As a modeling assumption, we will suppose that the knowledge that an agent has on the current system is represented by a probability…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-01-13 Andrea Pesare , Michele Palladino , Maurizio Falcone

We study the constrained variant of the \emph{multi-armed bandit} (MAB) problem, in which the learner aims not only at minimizing the total loss incurred during the learning dynamic, but also at controlling the violation of multiple…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Francesco Emanuele Stradi , Kalana Kalupahana , Matteo Castiglioni , Alberto Marchesi , Nicola Gatti

This paper bridges some of the gap between optimal planning and reinforcement learning (RL), both of which share roots in dynamic programming applied to sequential decision making or optimal control. Whereas planning typically favors…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Filip V. Georgiev , Kalle G. Timperi , Başak Sakçak , Steven M. LaValle

Episodic reinforcement learning and contextual bandits are two widely studied sequential decision-making problems. Episodic reinforcement learning generalizes contextual bandits and is often perceived to be more difficult due to long…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-01 Zihan Zhang , Xiangyang Ji , Simon S. Du

We study the problem of infinite-horizon average-reward reinforcement learning with linear Markov decision processes (MDPs). The associated Bellman operator of the problem not being a contraction makes the algorithm design challenging.…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-03-12 Kihyuk Hong , Woojin Chae , Yufan Zhang , Dabeen Lee , Ambuj Tewari