English
Related papers

Related papers: Efficient Model-Free Exploration in Low-Rank MDPs

200 papers

Poor sample efficiency continues to be the primary challenge for deployment of deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms for real-world applications, and in particular for visuo-motor control. Model-based RL has the potential to be highly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-13 Nicklas Hansen , Yixin Lin , Hao Su , Xiaolong Wang , Vikash Kumar , Aravind Rajeswaran

Motivated by the prevailing paradigm of using unsupervised learning for efficient exploration in reinforcement learning (RL) problems [tang2017exploration,bellemare2016unifying], we investigate when this paradigm is provably efficient. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-02 Fei Feng , Ruosong Wang , Wotao Yin , Simon S. Du , Lin F. Yang

Reinforcement learning has gained wide popularity as a technique for simulation-driven approximate dynamic programming. A less known aspect is that the very reasons that make it effective in dynamic programming can also be leveraged for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2013-11-13 Vivek S. Borkar , Adwaitvedant S. Mathkar

We present a new model-based algorithm for reinforcement learning (RL) which consists of explicit exploration and exploitation phases, and is applicable in large or infinite state spaces. The algorithm maintains a set of dynamics models…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-03 Mikael Henaff

We study risk-sensitive Reinforcement Learning (RL), where we aim to maximize the Conditional Value at Risk (CVaR) with a fixed risk tolerance $\tau$. Prior theoretical work studying risk-sensitive RL focuses on the tabular Markov Decision…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-21 Yulai Zhao , Wenhao Zhan , Xiaoyan Hu , Ho-fung Leung , Farzan Farnia , Wen Sun , Jason D. Lee

Modern tasks in reinforcement learning have large state and action spaces. To deal with them efficiently, one often uses predefined feature mapping to represent states and actions in a low-dimensional space. In this paper, we study…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-24 Dongruo Zhou , Jiafan He , Quanquan Gu

Model-free deep-reinforcement-based learning algorithms have been applied to a range of COPs~\cite{bello2016neural}~\cite{kool2018attention}~\cite{nazari2018reinforcement}. However, these approaches suffer from two key challenges when…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-01 Nasrin Sultana , Jeffrey Chan , Tabinda Sarwar , A. K. Qin

Efficient exploration is an unsolved problem in Reinforcement Learning which is usually addressed by reactively rewarding the agent for fortuitously encountering novel situations. This paper introduces an efficient active exploration…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-17 Pranav Shyam , Wojciech Jaśkowski , Faustino Gomez

We propose a model-free reinforcement learning algorithm inspired by the popular randomized least squares value iteration (RLSVI) algorithm as well as the optimism principle. Unlike existing upper-confidence-bound (UCB) based approaches,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-27 Haque Ishfaq , Qiwen Cui , Viet Nguyen , Alex Ayoub , Zhuoran Yang , Zhaoran Wang , Doina Precup , Lin F. Yang

Collecting and leveraging data with good coverage properties plays a crucial role in different aspects of reinforcement learning (RL), including reward-free exploration and offline learning. However, the notion of "good coverage" really…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-26 Aymen Al-Marjani , Andrea Tirinzoni , Emilie Kaufmann

Multi-task representation learning (MTRL) is an approach that learns shared latent representations across related tasks, facilitating collaborative learning that improves the overall learning efficiency. This paper studies MTRL for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-07 Yaoze Guo , Shana Moothedath

We study infinite-horizon Discounted Markov Decision Processes (DMDPs) under a generative model. Motivated by the Algorithm with Advice framework Mitzenmacher and Vassilvitskii 2022, we propose a novel framework to investigate how a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-24 Lixing Lyu , Jiashuo Jiang , Wang Chi Cheung

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 real-world reinforcement learning applications the learner's observation space is ubiquitously high-dimensional with both relevant and irrelevant information about the task at hand. Learning from high-dimensional observations has been…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-10 Yonathan Efroni , Dylan J. Foster , Dipendra Misra , Akshay Krishnamurthy , John Langford

Simulators are a pervasive tool in reinforcement learning, but most existing algorithms cannot efficiently exploit simulator access -- particularly in high-dimensional domains that require general function approximation. We explore the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-29 Zakaria Mhammedi , Dylan J. Foster , Alexander Rakhlin

Although model-based reinforcement learning (RL) approaches are considered more sample efficient, existing algorithms are usually relying on sophisticated planning algorithm to couple tightly with the model-learning procedure. Hence the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-15 Xiaoyu Chen , Jiachen Hu , Lin F. Yang , Liwei Wang

One of the key approaches to save samples in reinforcement learning (RL) is to use knowledge from an approximate model such as its simulator. However, how much does an approximate model help to learn a near-optimal policy of the true…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-15 Fei Feng , Wotao Yin , Lin F. Yang

Thompson sampling (TS) is one of the most popular exploration techniques in reinforcement learning (RL). However, most TS algorithms with theoretical guarantees are difficult to implement and not generalizable to Deep RL. While the emerging…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-19 Haque Ishfaq , Yixin Tan , Yu Yang , Qingfeng Lan , Jianfeng Lu , A. Rupam Mahmood , Doina Precup , Pan Xu

The success of deep reinforcement learning (DRL) lies in its ability to learn a representation that is well-suited for the exploration and exploitation task. To understand how the choice of representation can improve the efficiency of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-15 Weitong Zhang , Jiafan He , Dongruo Zhou , Amy Zhang , Quanquan Gu

This article is an extended version of previous work of the authors [40, 41] on low-rank matrix estimation in the presence of constraints on the factors into which the matrix is factorized. Low-rank matrix factorization is one of the basic…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2017-08-28 Thibault Lesieur , Florent Krzakala , Lenka Zdeborová