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Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning (HRL) approaches have shown successful results in solving a large variety of complex, structured, long-horizon problems. Nevertheless, a full theoretical understanding of this empirical evidence is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-05 Gianluca Drappo , Alberto Maria Metelli , Marcello Restelli

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 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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-04 Grigoris Velegkas , Zhuoran Yang , Amin Karbasi

Achieving sample efficiency in online episodic reinforcement learning (RL) requires optimally balancing exploration and exploitation. When it comes to a finite-horizon episodic Markov decision process with $S$ states, $A$ actions and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-18 Gen Li , Laixi Shi , Yuxin Chen , Yuejie Chi

In this paper, we study the episodic reinforcement learning (RL) problem modeled by finite-horizon Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) with constraint on the number of batches. The multi-batch reinforcement learning framework, where the agent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-18 Zihan Zhang , Yuhang Jiang , Yuan Zhou , Xiangyang Ji

Hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) improves the efficiency of long-horizon reinforcement-learning tasks with sparse rewards by decomposing the task into a hierarchy of subgoals. The main challenge of HRL is efficient discovery of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-08 Sadegh Khorasani , Saber Salehkaleybar , Negar Kiyavash , Matthias Grossglauser

Hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) is hypothesized to be able to leverage the inherent hierarchy in learning tasks where traditional reinforcement learning (RL) often fails. In this research, HRL is evaluated and contrasted with…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-08-20 Brendon Johnson , Alfredo Weitzenfeld

A recent goal in the Reinforcement Learning (RL) framework is to choose a sequence of actions or a policy to maximize the reward collected or minimize the regret incurred in a finite time horizon. For several RL problems in operation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-08-18 K J Prabuchandran , Tejas Bodas , Theja Tulabandhula

State-of-the-art efficient model-based Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms typically act by iteratively solving empirical models, i.e., by performing \emph{full-planning} on Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) built by the gathered…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-01 Yonathan Efroni , Nadav Merlis , Mohammad Ghavamzadeh , Shie Mannor

The options framework in Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning breaks down overall goals into a combination of options or simpler tasks and associated policies, allowing for abstraction in the action space. Ideally, these options can be…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-14 Kushal Chauhan , Soumya Chatterjee , Akash Reddy , Balaraman Ravindran , Pradeep Shenoy

Real-world tasks are often highly structured. Hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) has attracted research interest as an approach for leveraging the hierarchical structure of a given task in reinforcement learning (RL). However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-03-08 Takayuki Osa , Voot Tangkaratt , Masashi Sugiyama

To tackle long planning horizon problems in reinforcement learning with general function approximation, we propose the first algorithm, termed as UCRL-WVTR, that achieves both \emph{horizon-free} and \emph{instance-dependent}, since it…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-08 Jiayi Huang , Han Zhong , Liwei Wang , Lin F. Yang

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

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-05 Andrea Zanette , Emma Brunskill

Deep reinforcement learning has achieved impressive successes yet often requires a very large amount of interaction data. This result is perhaps unsurprising, as using complicated function approximation often requires more data to fit, and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-20 Jonathan N. Lee , Aldo Pacchiano , Vidya Muthukumar , Weihao Kong , Emma Brunskill

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-16 Kaixuan Ji , Qingyue Zhao , Jiafan He , Weitong Zhang , Quanquan Gu

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-15 Kihyun Yu , Duksang Lee , William Overman , Dabeen Lee

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

Solving long-horizon goal-conditioned tasks remains a significant challenge in reinforcement learning (RL). Hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) addresses this by decomposing tasks into more manageable sub-tasks, but the automatic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-09 Yang Yu

Learning a transition model via Maximum Likelihood Estimation (MLE) followed by planning inside the learned model is perhaps the most standard and simplest Model-based Reinforcement Learning (RL) framework. In this work, we show that such a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-30 Zhiyong Wang , Dongruo Zhou , John C. S. Lui , Wen Sun
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