Related papers: Bridging Distributional and Risk-sensitive Reinfor…
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…
Most provably-efficient learning algorithms introduce optimism about poorly-understood states and actions to encourage exploration. We study an alternative approach for efficient exploration, posterior sampling for reinforcement learning…
Distributional reinforcement learning (DRL) enhances the understanding of the effects of the randomness in the environment by letting agents learn the distribution of a random return, rather than its expected value as in standard RL. At the…
In this paper, we prove that Distributional Reinforcement Learning (DistRL), which learns the return distribution, can obtain second-order bounds in both online and offline RL in general settings with function approximation. Second-order…
Risk-sensitive reinforcement learning (RL) is crucial for maintaining reliable performance in high-stakes applications. While traditional RL methods aim to learn a point estimate of the random cumulative cost, distributional RL (DRL) seeks…
We consider reinforcement learning (RL) in Markov Decision Processes in which an agent repeatedly interacts with an environment that is modeled by a controlled Markov process. At each time step $t$, it earns a reward, and also incurs a…
We present an algorithm based on the \emph{Optimism in the Face of Uncertainty} (OFU) principle which is able to learn Reinforcement Learning (RL) modeled by Markov decision process (MDP) with finite state-action space efficiently. By…
We consider the regret minimization problem in reinforcement learning (RL) in the episodic setting. In many real-world RL environments, the state and action spaces are continuous or very large. Existing approaches establish regret…
In this paper, we study reinforcement learning in Markov Decision Processes with Probabilistic Reward Machines (PRMs), a form of non-Markovian reward commonly found in robotics tasks. We design an algorithm for PRMs that achieves a regret…
We study regret minimization for reinforcement learning (RL) in Latent Markov Decision Processes (LMDPs) with context in hindsight. We design a novel model-based algorithmic framework which can be instantiated with both a model-optimistic…
This work pioneers regret analysis of risk-sensitive reinforcement learning in partially observable environments with hindsight observation, addressing a gap in theoretical exploration. We introduce a novel formulation that integrates…
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…
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…
We study finite episodic Markov decision processes incorporating dynamic risk measures to capture risk sensitivity. To this end, we present two model-based algorithms applied to \emph{Lipschitz} dynamic risk measures, a wide range of risk…
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…
The upper confidence reinforcement learning (UCRL2) algorithm introduced in (Jaksch et al., 2010) is a popular method to perform regret minimization in unknown discrete Markov Decision Processes under the average-reward criterion. Despite…
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…
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…
In domains such as finance, healthcare, and robotics, managing worst-case scenarios is critical, as failure to do so can lead to catastrophic outcomes. Distributional Reinforcement Learning (DRL) provides a natural framework to incorporate…
In many real-world settings, reinforcement learning systems suffer performance degradation when the environment encountered at deployment differs from that observed during training. Distributionally robust reinforcement learning (DR-RL)…