Related papers: Efficient Model-Free Exploration in Low-Rank MDPs
Thompson Sampling is one of the most effective methods for contextual bandits and has been generalized to posterior sampling for certain MDP settings. However, existing posterior sampling methods for reinforcement learning are limited by…
Structured distributions, i.e. distributions over combinatorial spaces, are commonly used to learn latent probabilistic representations from observed data. However, scaling these models is bottlenecked by the high computational and memory…
Reward-free reinforcement learning (RL) is a framework which is suitable for both the batch RL setting and the setting where there are many reward functions of interest. During the exploration phase, an agent collects samples without using…
In the numerical linear algebra community, it was suggested that to obtain nearly optimal bounds for various problems such as rank computation, finding a maximal linearly independent subset of columns (a basis), regression, or low-rank…
We study episodic reinforcement learning in non-stationary linear (a.k.a. low-rank) Markov Decision Processes (MDPs), i.e, both the reward and transition kernel are linear with respect to a given feature map and are allowed to evolve either…
We present BRIEE (Block-structured Representation learning with Interleaved Explore Exploit), an algorithm for efficient reinforcement learning in Markov Decision Processes with block-structured dynamics (i.e., Block MDPs), where rich…
High-dimensional observations and complex real-world dynamics present major challenges in reinforcement learning for both function approximation and exploration. We address both of these challenges with two complementary techniques: First,…
We present a method for enabling Reinforcement Learning of motor control policies for complex skills such as dexterous manipulation. We posit that a key difficulty for training such policies is the difficulty of exploring the problem state…
Exploration has been a crucial part of reinforcement learning, yet several important questions concerning exploration efficiency are still not answered satisfactorily by existing analytical frameworks. These questions include exploration…
A common belief in model-free reinforcement learning is that methods based on random search in the parameter space of policies exhibit significantly worse sample complexity than those that explore the space of actions. We dispel such…
We study variance-dependent regret bounds for Markov decision processes (MDPs). Algorithms with variance-dependent regret guarantees can automatically exploit environments with low variance (e.g., enjoying constant regret on deterministic…
We investigate the problems of model estimation and reward-free learning in episodic Block MDPs. In these MDPs, the decision maker has access to rich observations or contexts generated from a small number of latent states. We are first…
We consider the problem of unconstrained minimization of a smooth objective function in $\R^n$ in a setting where only function evaluations are possible. While importance sampling is one of the most popular techniques used by machine…
We present a scalable and effective exploration strategy based on Thompson sampling for reinforcement learning (RL). One of the key shortcomings of existing Thompson sampling algorithms is the need to perform a Gaussian approximation of the…
In contrast with many other convex optimization classes, state-of-the-art semidefinite programming solvers are yet unable to efficiently solve large scale instances. This work aims to reduce this scalability gap by proposing a novel…
We study the problem of deployment efficient reinforcement learning (RL) with linear function approximation under the \emph{reward-free} exploration setting. This is a well-motivated problem because deploying new policies is costly in…
Rank-revealing matrix decompositions provide an essential tool in spectral analysis of matrices, including the Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) and related low-rank approximation techniques. QR with Column Pivoting (QRCP) is usually…
We are interested in derivative-free optimization of high-dimensional functions. The sample complexity of existing methods is high and depends on problem dimensionality, unlike the dimensionality-independent rates of first-order methods.…
Reinforcement learning (RL) aims to find an optimal policy by interaction with an environment. Consequently, learning complex behavior requires a vast number of samples, which can be prohibitive in practice. Nevertheless, instead of…
Robust Markov decision processes (r-MDPs) extend MDPs by explicitly modelling epistemic uncertainty about transition dynamics. Learning r-MDPs from interactions with an unknown environment enables the synthesis of robust policies with…