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Meta reinforcement learning sets a distribution over a set of tasks on which the agent can train at will, then is asked to learn an optimal policy for any test task efficiently. In this paper, we consider a finite set of tasks modeled…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-05 Mirco Mutti , Aviv Tamar

We study the problem of planning under model uncertainty in an online meta-reinforcement learning (RL) setting where an agent is presented with a sequence of related tasks with limited interactions per task. The agent can use its experience…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-01-02 Khimya Khetarpal , Claire Vernade , Brendan O'Donoghue , Satinder Singh , Tom Zahavy

In many applications of Reinforcement Learning (RL), it is critically important that the algorithm performs safely, such that instantaneous hard constraints are satisfied at each step, and unsafe states and actions are avoided. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-10 Ming Shi , Yingbin Liang , Ness Shroff

Thompson sampling (TS) is one of the most popular and earliest algorithms to solve stochastic multi-armed bandit problems. We consider a variant of TS, named $\alpha$-TS, where we use a fractional or $\alpha$-posterior ($\alpha\in(0,1)$)…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-09-13 Prateek Jaiswal , Debdeep Pati , Anirban Bhattacharya , Bani K. Mallick

In this paper, we propose Posterior Sampling Reinforcement Learning for Zero-sum Stochastic Games (PSRL-ZSG), the first online learning algorithm that achieves Bayesian regret bound of $O(HS\sqrt{AT})$ in the infinite-horizon zero-sum…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-12 Mehdi Jafarnia-Jahromi , Rahul Jain , Ashutosh Nayyar

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has been able to solve hard problems such as playing Atari games or solving the game of Go, with a unified approach. Yet modern deep RL approaches are still not widely used in real-world applications. One reason…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-08 Achraf Azize , Othman Gaizi

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

We consider un-discounted reinforcement learning (RL) in Markov decision processes (MDPs) under temporal drifts, ie, both the reward and state transition distributions are allowed to evolve over time, as long as their respective total…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-05-19 Wang Chi Cheung , David Simchi-Levi , Ruihao Zhu

We study human-in-the-loop reinforcement learning (RL) with trajectory preferences, where instead of receiving a numeric reward at each step, the agent only receives preferences over trajectory pairs from a human overseer. The goal of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-25 Xiaoyu Chen , Han Zhong , Zhuoran Yang , Zhaoran Wang , Liwei Wang

We study online learning problems in which the learner has extra knowledge about the adversary's behaviour, i.e., in game-theoretic settings where opponents typically follow some no-external regret learning algorithms. Under this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-15 Le Cong Dinh , Tri-Dung Nguyen , Alain Zemkoho , Long Tran-Thanh

This paper studies model-based reinforcement learning (RL) for regret minimization. We focus on finite-horizon episodic RL where the transition model $P$ belongs to a known family of models $\mathcal{P}$, a special case of which is when…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-02 Alex Ayoub , Zeyu Jia , Csaba Szepesvari , Mengdi Wang , Lin F. Yang

Despite the wealth of research into provably efficient reinforcement learning algorithms, most works focus on tabular representation and thus struggle to handle exponentially or infinitely large state-action spaces. In this paper, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-10 Ahmed Touati , Adrien Ali Taiga , Marc G. Bellemare

We study algorithms using randomized value functions for exploration in reinforcement learning. This type of algorithms enjoys appealing empirical performance. We show that when we use 1) a single random seed in each episode, and 2) a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-14 Zhihan Xiong , Ruoqi Shen , Qiwen Cui , Maryam Fazel , Simon S. Du

We present a reduction from reinforcement learning (RL) to no-regret online learning based on the saddle-point formulation of RL, by which "any" online algorithm with sublinear regret can generate policies with provable performance…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-03 Ching-An Cheng , Remi Tachet des Combes , Byron Boots , Geoff Gordon

This paper considers the use of a simple posterior sampling algorithm to balance between exploration and exploitation when learning to optimize actions such as in multi-armed bandit problems. The algorithm, also known as Thompson Sampling,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2014-02-04 Daniel Russo , Benjamin Van Roy

We study reinforcement learning (RL) for a class of continuous-time linear-quadratic (LQ) control problems for diffusions, where states are scalar-valued and running control rewards are absent but volatilities of the state processes depend…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-25 Yilie Huang , Yanwei Jia , Xun Yu Zhou

We consider an agent interacting with an environment in a single stream of actions, observations, and rewards, with no reset. This process is not assumed to be a Markov Decision Process (MDP). Rather, the agent has several representations…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2013-03-19 Odalric-Ambrym Maillard , Phuong Nguyen , Ronald Ortner , Daniil Ryabko

We propose an optimistic model-based algorithm, dubbed SMRL, for finite-horizon episodic reinforcement learning (RL) when the transition model is specified by exponential family distributions with $d$ parameters and the reward is bounded…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-10 Gene Li , Junbo Li , Anmol Kabra , Nathan Srebro , Zhaoran Wang , Zhuoran Yang

Reinforcement learning algorithms often suffer from slow convergence due to sparse reward signals, particularly in complex environments where feedback is delayed or infrequent. This paper introduces the Psychological Regret Model (PRM), a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Zhe Xu

Existing studies on provably efficient algorithms for Markov games (MGs) almost exclusively build on the "optimism in the face of uncertainty" (OFU) principle. This work focuses on a different approach of posterior sampling, which is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-06 Wei Xiong , Han Zhong , Chengshuai Shi , Cong Shen , Tong Zhang