Related papers: Provably Efficient Reinforcement Learning via Surp…
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…
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…
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,…
Model-free algorithms for reinforcement learning typically require a condition called Bellman completeness in order to successfully operate off-policy with function approximation, unless additional conditions are met. However, Bellman…
Hard constraints in reinforcement learning (RL) often degrade policy performance. Lagrangian methods offer a way to blend objectives with constraints, but require intricate reward engineering and parameter tuning. In this work, we extend…
Risk-sensitive reinforcement learning (RL) aims to optimize policies that balance the expected reward and risk. In this paper, we present a novel risk-sensitive RL framework that employs an Iterated Conditional Value-at-Risk (CVaR)…
Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has improved the reasoning ability of large language models, yet training remains costly because many rollouts contribute little to optimization, considering the amount of computation…
Reinforcement learning utilizing kernel ridge regression to predict the expected value function represents a powerful method with great representational capacity. This setting is a highly versatile framework amenable to analytical results.…
Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has been an effective approach for improving Large Language Models' reasoning in domains such as coding and mathematics. Here, we apply RLVR methods towards forecasting future real-world…
Deep reinforcement learning (RL) has shown remarkable success in specific offline decision-making scenarios, yet its theoretical guarantees are still under development. Existing works on offline RL theory primarily emphasize a few trivial…
We study the regret guarantee for risk-sensitive reinforcement learning (RSRL) via distributional reinforcement learning (DRL) methods. In particular, we consider finite episodic Markov decision processes whose objective is the entropic…
While policy-based reinforcement learning (RL) achieves tremendous successes in practice, it is significantly less understood in theory, especially compared with value-based RL. In particular, it remains elusive how to design a provably…
In safety-critical applications of reinforcement learning such as healthcare and robotics, it is often desirable to optimize risk-sensitive objectives that account for tail outcomes rather than expected reward. We prove the first regret…
We consider the exploration-exploitation dilemma in finite-horizon reinforcement learning (RL). When the state space is large or continuous, traditional tabular approaches are unfeasible and some form of function approximation is mandatory.…
Despite the fact that deep reinforcement learning (RL) has surpassed human-level performances in various tasks, it still has several fundamental challenges. First, most RL methods require intensive data from the exploration of the…
We study risk-sensitive reinforcement learning in episodic Markov decision processes with unknown transition kernels, where the goal is to optimize the total reward under the risk measure of exponential utility. We propose two provably…
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…
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…
With the increasing need for handling large state and action spaces, general function approximation has become a key technique in reinforcement learning (RL). In this paper, we propose a general framework that unifies model-based and…
In this paper, we study the problem of regret minimization for episodic Reinforcement Learning (RL) both in the model-free and the model-based setting. We focus on learning with general function classes and general model classes, and we…