Related papers: Nearly Minimax Optimal Reinforcement Learning with…
A tenet of reinforcement learning is that the agent always observes rewards. However, this is not true in many realistic settings, e.g., a human observer may not always be available to provide rewards, sensors may be limited or…
Strong worst-case performance bounds for episodic reinforcement learning exist but fortunately in practice RL algorithms perform much better than such bounds would predict. Algorithms and theory that provide strong problem-dependent bounds…
This paper presents a new model-free algorithm for episodic finite-horizon Markov Decision Processes (MDP), Adaptive Multi-step Bootstrap (AMB), which enjoys a stronger gap-dependent regret bound. The first innovation is to estimate the…
We consider the framework of methods for unconstrained minimization that are, in each iteration, restricted to a model that is only a valid approximation to the objective function on some affine subspace containing an incumbent point. These…
In this paper we consider multi-objective reinforcement learning where the objectives are balanced using preferences. In practice, the preferences are often given in an adversarial manner, e.g., customers can be picky in many applications.…
We consider linear stochastic bandits where the set of actions is an ellipsoid. We provide the first known minimax optimal algorithm for this problem. We first derive a novel information-theoretic lower bound on the regret of any algorithm,…
This paper presents a new algorithm for online linear regression whose efficiency guarantees satisfy the requirements of the KWIK (Knows What It Knows) framework. The algorithm improves on the complexity bounds of the current…
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…
We propose an epoch-based reinforcement learning algorithm for infinite-horizon average-cost Markov decision processes (MDPs) that leverages a partial order over a policy class. In this structure, $\pi' \leq \pi$ if data collected under…
We consider online learning in episodic loop-free Markov decision processes (MDPs), where the loss function can change arbitrarily between episodes, and the transition function is not known to the learner. We show…
In this work, we consider the popular tree-based search strategy within the framework of reinforcement learning, the Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS), in the context of infinite-horizon discounted cost Markov Decision Process (MDP). While…
A fundamental question in reinforcement learning is whether model-free algorithms are sample efficient. Recently, Jin et al. \cite{jin2018q} proposed a Q-learning algorithm with UCB exploration policy, and proved it has nearly optimal…
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…
Reinforcement learning (RL) problems are fundamental in online decision-making and have been instrumental in finding an optimal policy for Markov decision processes (MDPs). Function approximations are usually deployed to handle large or…
We study risk-sensitive Reinforcement Learning (RL), where we aim to maximize the Conditional Value at Risk (CVaR) with a fixed risk tolerance $\tau$. Prior theoretical work studying risk-sensitive RL focuses on the tabular Markov Decision…
The classical theory of reinforcement learning (RL) has focused on tabular and linear representations of value functions. Further progress hinges on combining RL with modern function approximators such as kernel functions and deep neural…
We investigate the problem of best-policy identification in discounted Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) when the learner has access to a generative model. The objective is to devise a learning algorithm returning the best policy as early as…
Offline reinforcement learning (RL) aims to find an optimal policy for Markov decision processes (MDPs) using a pre-collected dataset. In this work, we revisit the linear programming (LP) reformulation of Markov decision processes for…
We investigate the problem of best policy identification in discounted linear Markov Decision Processes in the fixed confidence setting under a generative model. We first derive an instance-specific lower bound on the expected number of…
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…