Related papers: Active Coverage for PAC Reinforcement Learning
Reward-free reinforcement learning (RL) considers the setting where the agent does not have access to a reward function during exploration, but must propose a near-optimal policy for an arbitrary reward function revealed only after…
Model-based Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a popular learning paradigm due to its potential sample efficiency compared to model-free RL. However, existing empirical model-based RL approaches lack the ability to explore. This work studies a…
We study offline Reinforcement Learning in large infinite-horizon discounted Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) when the reward and transition models are linearly realizable under a known feature map. Starting from the classic linear-program…
Exploration is a major challenge in reinforcement learning, especially for high-dimensional domains that require function approximation. We propose exploration objectives -- policy optimization objectives that enable downstream maximization…
We study reward-free reinforcement learning (RL) with linear function approximation, where the agent works in two phases: (1) in the exploration phase, the agent interacts with the environment but cannot access the reward; and (2) in the…
We study learning optimal policies from a logged dataset, i.e., offline RL, with function approximation. Despite the efforts devoted, existing algorithms with theoretic finite-sample guarantees typically assume exploratory data coverage or…
Exploration is widely regarded as one of the most challenging aspects of reinforcement learning (RL), with many naive approaches succumbing to exponential sample complexity. To isolate the challenges of exploration, we propose a new…
Efficient exploration is one of the key challenges for reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms. Most traditional sample efficiency bounds require strategic exploration. Recently many deep RL algorithms with simple heuristic exploration…
To achieve sample efficiency in reinforcement learning (RL), it necessitates efficiently exploring the underlying environment. Under the offline setting, addressing the exploration challenge lies in collecting an offline dataset with…
In many real-world decision problems there is partially observed, hidden or latent information that remains fixed throughout an interaction. Such decision problems can be modeled as Latent Markov Decision Processes (LMDPs), where a latent…
Direct policy gradient methods for reinforcement learning are a successful approach for a variety of reasons: they are model free, they directly optimize the performance metric of interest, and they allow for richly parameterized policies.…
Planning plays an important role in the broad class of decision theory. Planning has drawn much attention in recent work in the robotics and sequential decision making areas. Recently, Reinforcement Learning (RL), as an agent-environment…
During initial iterations of training in most Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms, agents perform a significant number of random exploratory steps. In the real world, this can limit the practicality of these algorithms as it can lead to…
We study offline reinforcement learning in average-reward MDPs, which presents increased challenges from the perspectives of distribution shift and non-uniform coverage, and has been relatively underexamined from a theoretical perspective.…
Language model alignment (or, reinforcement learning) techniques that leverage active exploration -- deliberately encouraging the model to produce diverse, informative responses -- offer the promise of super-human capabilities. However,…
Within the framework of probably approximately correct Markov decision processes (PAC-MDP), much theoretical work has focused on methods to attain near optimality after a relatively long period of learning and exploration. However,…
In probably approximately correct (PAC) reinforcement learning (RL), an agent is required to identify an $\epsilon$-optimal policy with probability $1-\delta$. While minimax optimal algorithms exist for this problem, its instance-dependent…
We study the problem of exploration in Reinforcement Learning and present a novel model-free solution. We adopt an information-theoretical viewpoint and start from the instance-specific lower bound of the number of samples that have to be…
Coverage conditions -- which assert that the data logging distribution adequately covers the state space -- play a fundamental role in determining the sample complexity of offline reinforcement learning. While such conditions might seem…
This paper targets the efficient construction of a safety shield for decision making in scenarios that incorporate uncertainty. Markov decision processes (MDPs) are prominent models to capture such planning problems. Reinforcement learning…