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One of the main challenges in reinforcement learning is solving tasks with sparse reward. We show that the difficulty of discovering a distant rewarding state in an MDP is bounded by the expected cover time of a random walk over the graph…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2019-03-19 Yuu Jinnai , Jee Won Park , David Abel , George Konidaris

In this paper,we consider the restless bandit problem, which is one of the most well-studied generalizations of the celebrated stochastic multi-armed bandit problem in decision theory. However, it is known be PSPACE-Hard to approximate to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2011-04-29 Quan Liu , Kehao Wang , Lin Chen

We propose randomized least-squares value iteration (RLSVI) -- a new reinforcement learning algorithm designed to explore and generalize efficiently via linearly parameterized value functions. We explain why versions of least-squares value…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2016-02-16 Ian Osband , Benjamin Van Roy , Zheng Wen

Markov decision processes (MDPs) are used to model a wide variety of applications ranging from game playing over robotics to finance. Their optimal policy typically maximizes the expected sum of rewards given at each step of the decision…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-26 Maximilian Nägele , Jan Olle , Thomas Fösel , Remmy Zen , Florian Marquardt

Stochastic and soft optimal policies resulting from entropy-regularized Markov decision processes (ER-MDP) are desirable for exploration and imitation learning applications. Motivated by the fact that such policies are sensitive with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-03 Tien Mai , Patrick Jaillet

The infamous exploration-exploitation dilemma is one of the oldest and most important problems in reinforcement learning (RL). Deliberate and effective exploration is necessary for RL agents to succeed in most environments. However, until…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-10-09 Suraj Narayanan Sasikumar

We present a full implementation and simulation of a novel quantum reinforcement learning method. Our work is a detailed and formal proof of concept for how quantum algorithms can be used to solve reinforcement learning problems and shows…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2023-11-10 Simon Wiedemann , Daniel Hein , Steffen Udluft , Christian Mendl

Bayesian approaches provide a principled solution to the exploration-exploitation trade-off in Reinforcement Learning. Typical approaches, however, either assume a fully observable environment or scale poorly. This work introduces the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-11-15 Sammie Katt , Frans Oliehoek , Christopher Amato

With the increasing need for handling large state and action spaces, general function approximation has become a key technique in reinforcement learning (RL). In this paper, we propose a general framework that unifies model-based and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-03 Zixiang Chen , Chris Junchi Li , Angela Yuan , Quanquan Gu , Michael I. Jordan

Deep networks have enabled reinforcement learning to scale to more complex and challenging domains, but these methods typically require large quantities of training data. An alternative is to use sample-efficient episodic control methods:…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-22 Marta Sarrico , Kai Arulkumaran , Andrea Agostinelli , Pierre Richemond , Anil Anthony Bharath

We consider large-scale Markov decision processes (MDPs) with parameter uncertainty, under the robust MDP paradigm. Previous studies showed that robust MDPs, based on a minimax approach to handle uncertainty, can be solved using dynamic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2013-06-27 Aviv Tamar , Huan Xu , Shie Mannor

We propose novel classical and quantum online algorithms for learning finite-horizon and infinite-horizon average-reward Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). Our algorithms are based on a hybrid exploration-generative reinforcement learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-12 Andris Ambainis , Joao F. Doriguello , Debbie Lim

Reward-free reinforcement learning (RL) considers the setting where the agent does not have access to a reward function during exploration, but must propose a near-optimal policy for an arbitrary reward function revealed only after…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-22 Andrew Wagenmaker , Yifang Chen , Max Simchowitz , Simon S. Du , Kevin Jamieson

As children acquire the knowledge of their language's morphology, they invariably discover the productive processes that can generalize to new words. Morphological learning is made challenging by the fact that even fully productive rules…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-05-13 Caleb Belth , Sarah Payne , Deniz Beser , Jordan Kodner , Charles Yang

While reinforcement learning has shown experimental success in a number of applications, it is known to be sensitive to noise and perturbations in the parameters of the system, leading to high variance in the total reward amongst different…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-12-02 Erfaun Noorani , Christos Mavridis , John Baras

Reinforcement learning often needs to deal with the exponential growth of states and actions when exploring optimal control in high-dimensional spaces (often known as the curse of dimensionality). In this work, we address this issue by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-23 Yining Li , Peizhong Ju , Ness Shroff

Reinforcement learning (RL) has traditionally been understood from an episodic perspective; the concept of non-episodic RL, where there is no restart and therefore no reliable recovery, remains elusive. A fundamental question in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-31 Shuang Liu , Hao Su

The purpose of this paper is to provide further understanding into the structure of the sequential allocation ("stochastic multi-armed bandit", or MAB) problem by establishing probability one finite horizon bounds and convergence rates for…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2015-12-18 Wesley Cowan , Michael N. Katehakis

Exploration in multi-task reinforcement learning is critical in training agents to deduce the underlying MDP. Many of the existing exploration frameworks such as $E^3$, $R_{max}$, Thompson sampling assume a single stationary MDP and are not…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2016-12-04 Sai Praveen Bangaru , JS Suhas , Balaraman Ravindran

The authors of 'Unsupervised Reinforcement Learning in Multiple environments' propose a method, alpha-MEPOL, to tackle unsupervised RL across multiple environments. They pre-train a task-agnostic exploration policy using interactions from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-10 Shaurya Dewan , Anisha Jain , Zoe LaLena , Lifan Yu