Related papers: Horizon-Free and Instance-Dependent Regret Bounds …
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…
Exploration in reinforcement learning (RL) suffers from the curse of dimensionality when the state-action space is large. A common practice is to parameterize the high-dimensional value and policy functions using given features. However…
Value function approximation is important in modern reinforcement learning (RL) problems especially when the state space is (infinitely) large. Despite the importance and wide applicability of value function approximation, its theoretical…
Recently, model-free reinforcement learning has attracted research attention due to its simplicity, memory and computation efficiency, and the flexibility to combine with function approximation. In this paper, we propose Exploration…
We propose novel classical and quantum online algorithms for learning finite-horizon and infinite-horizon average-reward Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). Our algorithms are based on a hybrid exploration-generative reinforcement learning…
We study time-inhomogeneous episodic reinforcement learning (RL) under general function approximation and sparse rewards. We design a new algorithm, Variance-weighted Optimistic $Q$-Learning (VO$Q$L), based on $Q$-learning and bound its…
We study fine-grained gap-dependent regret bounds for model-free reinforcement learning in episodic tabular Markov Decision Processes. Existing model-free algorithms achieve minimax worst-case regret, but their gap-dependent bounds remain…
Reinforcement learning (RL) with linear function approximation has received increasing attention recently. However, existing work has focused on obtaining $\sqrt{T}$-type regret bound, where $T$ is the number of interactions with the MDP.…
Recently, several studies (Zhou et al., 2021a; Zhang et al., 2021b; Kim et al., 2021; Zhou and Gu, 2022) have provided variance-dependent regret bounds for linear contextual bandits, which interpolates the regret for the worst-case regime…
While quantum reinforcement learning (RL) has attracted a surge of attention recently, its theoretical understanding is limited. In particular, it remains elusive how to design provably efficient quantum RL algorithms that can address the…
Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) replaces hard-to-specify rewards with pairwise trajectory preferences, yet regret-oriented theory often assumes that preference labels are generated consistently from a single ground-truth…
Recent studies have shown that episodic reinforcement learning (RL) is not more difficult than contextual bandits, even with a long planning horizon and unknown state transitions. However, these results are limited to either tabular Markov…
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…
Model-free reinforcement learning is known to be memory and computation efficient and more amendable to large scale problems. In this paper, two model-free algorithms are introduced for learning infinite-horizon average-reward Markov…
We study reinforcement learning (RL) for a class of continuous-time linear-quadratic (LQ) control problems for diffusions, where states are scalar-valued and running control rewards are absent but volatilities of the state processes depend…
We study the kernelized bandit problem, that involves designing an adaptive strategy for querying a noisy zeroth-order-oracle to efficiently learn about the optimizer of an unknown function $f$ with a norm bounded by $M<\infty$ in a…
Obtaining first-order regret bounds -- regret bounds scaling not as the worst-case but with some measure of the performance of the optimal policy on a given instance -- is a core question in sequential decision-making. While such bounds…
We consider the problem of tabular infinite horizon concave utility reinforcement learning (CURL) with convex constraints. For this, we propose a model-based learning algorithm that also achieves zero constraint violations. Assuming that…
We study the infinite-horizon average-reward reinforcement learning (RL) for continuous space Lipschitz MDPs in which an agent can play policies from a given set $\Phi$. The proposed algorithms efficiently explore the policy space by…
In safety-critical applications of reinforcement learning such as healthcare and robotics, it is often desirable to optimize risk-sensitive objectives that account for tail outcomes rather than expected reward. We prove the first regret…