Related papers: VO$Q$L: Towards Optimal Regret in Model-free RL wi…
Recent studies have shown that episodic reinforcement learning (RL) is no harder than bandits when the total reward is bounded by $1$, and proved regret bounds that have a polylogarithmic dependence on the planning horizon $H$. However, it…
We study model-based reinforcement learning in an unknown finite communicating Markov decision process. We propose a simple algorithm that leverages a variance based confidence interval. We show that the proposed algorithm, UCRL-V, achieves…
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…
In online inverse linear optimization, a learner observes time-varying sets of feasible actions and an agent's optimal actions, selected by solving linear optimization over the feasible actions. The learner sequentially makes predictions of…
We present an optimistic Q-learning algorithm for regret minimization in average reward reinforcement learning under an additional assumption on the underlying MDP that for all policies, the time to visit some frequent state $s_0$ is finite…
Recent literature has made much progress in understanding \emph{online LQR}: a modern learning-theoretic take on the classical control problem in which a learner attempts to optimally control an unknown linear dynamical system with fully…
Recently, several studies (Zhou et al., 2021a; Zhang et al., 2021b; Kim et al., 2021; Zhou and Gu, 2022) have provided variance-dependent regret bounds for linear contextual bandits, which interpolates the regret for the worst-case regime…
We consider the problem of nonstochastic control with a sequence of quadratic losses, i.e., LQR control. We provide an efficient online algorithm that achieves an optimal dynamic (policy) regret of $\tilde{O}(\text{max}\{n^{1/3}…
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 study reinforcement learning with linear function approximation and adversarially changing cost functions, a setup that has mostly been considered under simplifying assumptions such as full information feedback or exploratory…
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…
This paper studies representation learning for multi-task linear bandits and multi-task episodic RL with linear value function approximation. We first consider the setting where we play $M$ linear bandits with dimension $d$ concurrently,…
We study the problem of adaptive control of a high dimensional linear quadratic (LQ) system. Previous work established the asymptotic convergence to an optimal controller for various adaptive control schemes. More recently, for the average…
In this paper, we propose and study opportunistic reinforcement learning - a new variant of reinforcement learning problems where the regret of selecting a suboptimal action varies under an external environmental condition known as the…
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 consider model-free reinforcement learning (RL) in non-stationary Markov decision processes. Both the reward functions and the state transition functions are allowed to vary arbitrarily over time as long as their cumulative variations do…
We develop a model selection approach to tackle reinforcement learning with adversarial corruption in both transition and reward. For finite-horizon tabular MDPs, without prior knowledge on the total amount of corruption, our algorithm…
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…
We consider reinforcement learning (RL) in episodic Markov decision processes (MDPs) with linear function approximation under drifting environment. Specifically, both the reward and state transition functions can evolve over time but their…
This paper studies the safe reinforcement learning problem formulated as an episodic finite-horizon tabular constrained Markov decision process with an unknown transition kernel and stochastic reward and cost functions. We propose a…