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We give a simple optimistic algorithm for which it is easy to derive regret bounds of $\tilde{O}(\sqrt{t_{\rm mix} SAT})$ after $T$ steps in uniformly ergodic Markov decision processes with $S$ states, $A$ actions, and mixing time parameter…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-01-23 Ronald Ortner

Obtaining first-order regret bounds -- regret bounds scaling not as the worst-case but with some measure of the performance of the optimal policy on a given instance -- is a core question in sequential decision-making. While such bounds…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-24 Andrew Wagenmaker , Yifang Chen , Max Simchowitz , Simon S. Du , Kevin Jamieson

We study the sample complexity of online reinforcement learning in the general \hzyrev{non-episodic} setting of nonlinear dynamical systems with continuous state and action spaces. Our analysis accommodates a large class of dynamical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-02 Michael Muehlebach , Zhiyu He , Michael I. Jordan

Bayesian posterior sampling techniques have demonstrated superior empirical performance in many exploration-exploitation settings. However, their theoretical analysis remains a challenge, especially in complex settings like reinforcement…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-30 Priyank Agrawal , Shipra Agrawal , Azmat Azati

Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) is attractive in scenarios where reward engineering can be tedious. However, prior IRL algorithms use on-policy transitions, which require intensive sampling from the current policy for stable and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-24 Hana Hoshino , Kei Ota , Asako Kanezaki , Rio Yokota

We study the problem of reinforcement learning in infinite-horizon discounted linear Markov decision processes (MDPs), and propose the first computationally efficient algorithm achieving rate-optimal regret guarantees in this setting. Our…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-16 Antoine Moulin , Gergely Neu , Luca Viano

In many real-world applications, it is hard to provide a reward signal in each step of a Reinforcement Learning (RL) process and more natural to give feedback when an episode ends. To this end, we study the recently proposed model of RL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-15 Asaf Cassel , Haipeng Luo , Aviv Rosenberg , Dmitry Sotnikov

Sample inefficiency is a long-lasting challenge in deep reinforcement learning (DRL). Despite dramatic improvements have been made, the problem is far from being solved and is especially challenging in environments with sparse or delayed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-17 Federico Malato , Ville Hautamaki

The theory of reinforcement learning has focused on two fundamental problems: achieving low regret, and identifying $\epsilon$-optimal policies. While a simple reduction allows one to apply a low-regret algorithm to obtain an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-23 Andrew Wagenmaker , Max Simchowitz , Kevin Jamieson

We study meta-reinforcement learning in finite-horizon MDPs where related tasks share similar structures in their optimal action-value functions. Specifically, we posit a linear representation $Q^*_h(s,a)=\Phi_h(s,a)\,\theta^{(k)}_h$ and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-08 Runlin Zhou , Chixiang Chen , Elynn Chen

We study the problem of nonepisodic reinforcement learning (RL) for nonlinear dynamical systems, where the system dynamics are unknown and the RL agent has to learn from a single trajectory, i.e., without resets. We propose Nonepisodic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-12 Bhavya Sukhija , Lenart Treven , Florian Dörfler , Stelian Coros , Andreas Krause

We consider the setting of online logistic regression and consider the regret with respect to the 2-ball of radius B. It is known (see [Hazan et al., 2014]) that any proper algorithm which has logarithmic regret in the number of samples…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-04 Rémi Jézéquel , Pierre Gaillard , Alessandro Rudi

In this paper, we prove the first Bayesian regret bounds for Thompson Sampling in reinforcement learning in a multitude of settings. We simplify the learning problem using a discrete set of surrogate environments, and present a refined…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-02-08 Ahmadreza Moradipari , Mohammad Pedramfar , Modjtaba Shokrian Zini , Vaneet Aggarwal

A central issue lying at the heart of online reinforcement learning (RL) is data efficiency. While a number of recent works achieved asymptotically minimal regret in online RL, the optimality of these results is only guaranteed in a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-30 Zihan Zhang , Yuxin Chen , Jason D. Lee , Simon S. Du

The expected regret of any reinforcement learning algorithm is lower bounded by $\Omega\left(\sqrt{DXAT}\right)$ for undiscounted returns, where $D$ is the diameter of the Markov decision process, $X$ the size of the state space, $A$ the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-10 Lucas Weber , Ana Bušić , Jiamin Zhu

We initiate the study of multi-stage episodic reinforcement learning under adversarial corruptions in both the rewards and the transition probabilities of the underlying system extending recent results for the special case of stochastic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-02 Thodoris Lykouris , Max Simchowitz , Aleksandrs Slivkins , Wen Sun

We consider the problem where $M$ agents interact with $M$ identical and independent environments with $S$ states and $A$ actions using reinforcement learning for $T$ rounds. The agents share their data with a central server to minimize…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-23 Mridul Agarwal , Bhargav Ganguly , Vaneet Aggarwal

We revisit the problem of \textit{online linear optimization} in case the set of feasible actions is accessible through an approximated linear optimization oracle with a factor $\alpha$ multiplicative approximation guarantee. This setting…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-09-12 Dan Garber

In this paper, we study the problem of online sparse linear regression (OSLR) where the algorithms are restricted to accessing only $k$ out of $d$ attributes per instance for prediction, which was proved to be NP-hard. Previous work gave…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-03 Junfan Li , Shizhong Liao , Zenglin Xu , Liqiang Nie

Thompson Sampling is one of the most effective methods for contextual bandits and has been generalized to posterior sampling for certain MDP settings. However, existing posterior sampling methods for reinforcement learning are limited by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-24 Christoph Dann , Mehryar Mohri , Tong Zhang , Julian Zimmert