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There are many algorithms for regret minimisation in episodic reinforcement learning. This problem is well-understood from a theoretical perspective, providing that the sequences of states, actions and rewards associated with each episode…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-07 Benjamin Howson , Ciara Pike-Burke , Sarah Filippi

Online learning with delayed feedback has received increasing attention recently due to its several applications in distributed, web-based learning problems. In this paper we provide a systematic study of the topic, and analyze the effect…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-07-02 Pooria Joulani , András György , Csaba Szepesvári

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-23 Dan Qiao , Yu-Xiang Wang

We study gap-dependent performance guarantees for nearly minimax-optimal algorithms in reinforcement learning with linear function approximation. While prior works have established gap-dependent regret bounds in this setting, existing…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-02-25 Haochen Zhang , Zhong Zheng , Lingzhou Xue

We propose a general framework to design posterior sampling methods for model-based RL. We show that the proposed algorithms can be analyzed by reducing regret to Hellinger distance in conditional probability estimation. We further show…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-18 Alekh Agarwal , Tong Zhang

Reinforcement learning (RL) has increasingly become a pivotal technique in the post-training of large language models (LLMs). The effective exploration of the output space is essential for the success of RL. We observe that for complex…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-08 Shihan Dou , Muling Wu , Jingwen Xu , Rui Zheng , Tao Gui , Qi Zhang , Xuanjing Huang

Safety in reinforcement learning has become increasingly important in recent years. Yet, existing solutions either fail to strictly avoid choosing unsafe actions, which may lead to catastrophic results in safety-critical systems, or fail to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-14 Sanae Amani , Christos Thrampoulidis , Lin F. Yang

In this paper, we study reinforcement learning in Markov Decision Processes with Probabilistic Reward Machines (PRMs), a form of non-Markovian reward commonly found in robotics tasks. We design an algorithm for PRMs that achieves a regret…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-08-21 Xiaofeng Lin , Xuezhou Zhang

Empowered by expressive function approximators such as neural networks, deep reinforcement learning (DRL) achieves tremendous empirical successes. However, learning expressive function approximators requires collecting a large dataset…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-23 Lingxiao Wang , Zhuoran Yang , Zhaoran Wang

Recently, adversarial imitation learning has shown a scalable reward acquisition method for inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) problems. However, estimated reward signals often become uncertain and fail to train a reliable statistical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-06 Dong-Sig Han , Hyunseo Kim , Hyundo Lee , Je-Hwan Ryu , Byoung-Tak Zhang

Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a promising strategy for finetuning small language models (SLMs) to solve targeted tasks such as math and coding. However, RL algorithms tend to be resource-intensive, taking a significant amount…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Lianghuan Huang , Sagnik Anupam , Insup Lee , Shuo Li , Osbert Bastani

We present the first theoretical guarantees for differentially private online reinforcement learning (RL) with general function approximation, extending beyond prior work restricted to tabular and linear settings. Our approach combines a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Yi He , Xingyu Zhou

Replication of experimental results has been a challenge faced by many scientific disciplines, including the field of machine learning. Recent work on the theory of machine learning has formalized replicability as the demand that an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-15 Eric Eaton , Marcel Hussing , Michael Kearns , Aaron Roth , Sikata Bela Sengupta , Jessica Sorrell

In this paper, we address the following problem: Given an offline demonstration dataset from an imperfect expert, what is the best way to leverage it to bootstrap online learning performance in MDPs. We first propose an Informed Posterior…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-18 Botao Hao , Rahul Jain , Dengwang Tang , Zheng Wen

We consider reinforcement learning (RL) in episodic Markov decision processes (MDPs) with linear function approximation under drifting environment. Specifically, both the reward and state transition functions can evolve over time but their…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-16 Huozhi Zhou , Jinglin Chen , Lav R. Varshney , Ashish Jagmohan

The stochastic generalised linear bandit is a well-understood model for sequential decision-making problems, with many algorithms achieving near-optimal regret guarantees under immediate feedback. However, the stringent requirement for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-12 Benjamin Howson , Ciara Pike-Burke , Sarah Filippi

We study reinforcement learning with linear function approximation where the transition probability and reward functions are linear with respect to a feature mapping $\boldsymbol{\phi}(s,a)$. Specifically, we consider the episodic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-31 Pihe Hu , Yu Chen , Longbo Huang

Reinforcement Learning (RL) empowers agents to acquire various skills by learning from reward signals. Unfortunately, designing high-quality instance-level rewards often demands significant effort. An emerging alternative, RL with delayed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-29 Yuting Tang , Xin-Qiang Cai , Jing-Cheng Pang , Qiyu Wu , Yao-Xiang Ding , Masashi Sugiyama

Deep latent variable models have achieved significant empirical successes in model-based reinforcement learning (RL) due to their expressiveness in modeling complex transition dynamics. On the other hand, it remains unclear theoretically…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-08 Tongzheng Ren , Chenjun Xiao , Tianjun Zhang , Na Li , Zhaoran Wang , Sujay Sanghavi , Dale Schuurmans , Bo Dai

Provably sample-efficient Reinforcement Learning (RL) with rich observations and function approximation has witnessed tremendous recent progress, particularly when the underlying function approximators are linear. In this linear regime,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-09 Alekh Agarwal , Tong Zhang