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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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-23 Runlong Zhou , Zihan Zhang , Simon S. Du

Deep reinforcement learning (RL) is a powerful approach to complex decision making. However, one issue that limits its practical application is its brittleness, sometimes failing to train in the presence of small changes in the environment.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-27 Jung-Hoon Cho , Vindula Jayawardana , Sirui Li , Cathy Wu

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

We study the model-based undiscounted reinforcement learning for partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs). The oracle we consider is the optimal policy of the POMDP with a known environment in terms of the average reward over…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-19 Yi Xiong , Ningyuan Chen , Xuefeng Gao , Xiang Zhou

Combinatorial optimisation problems framed as mixed integer linear programmes (MILPs) are ubiquitous across a range of real-world applications. The canonical branch-and-bound algorithm seeks to exactly solve MILPs by constructing a search…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-16 Christopher W. F. Parsonson , Alexandre Laterre , Thomas D. Barrett

Distributionally robust reinforcement learning (DR-RL) has recently gained significant attention as a principled approach that addresses discrepancies between training and testing environments. To balance robustness, conservatism, and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-29 Zhenghao Li , Shengbo Wang , Nian Si

Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms are known to suffer from the curse of dimensionality, which refers to the fact that large-scale problems often lead to exponentially high sample complexity. A common solution is to use deep neural…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-13 Chenbei Lu , Laixi Shi , Zaiwei Chen , Chenye Wu , Adam Wierman

This paper studies regret minimization with randomized value functions in reinforcement learning. In tabular finite-horizon Markov Decision Processes, we introduce a clipping variant of one classical Thompson Sampling (TS)-like algorithm,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-10 Priyank Agrawal , Jinglin Chen , Nan Jiang

A recent line of works showed regret bounds in reinforcement learning (RL) can be (nearly) independent of planning horizon, a.k.a.~the horizon-free bounds. However, these regret bounds only apply to settings where a polynomial dependency on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-19 Zihan Zhang , Jason D. Lee , Yuxin Chen , Simon S. Du

Online linear programming plays an important role in both revenue management and resource allocation, and recent research has focused on developing efficient first-order online learning algorithms. Despite the empirical success of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-01-07 Wenzhi Gao , Dongdong Ge , Chenyu Xue , Chunlin Sun , Yinyu Ye

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-24 Christoph Dann , Mehryar Mohri , Tong Zhang , Julian Zimmert

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

Learning in POMDPs is known to be significantly harder than in MDPs. In this paper, we consider the online learning problem for episodic POMDPs with unknown transition and observation models. We propose a Posterior Sampling-based…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-24 Dengwang Tang , Dongze Ye , Rahul Jain , Ashutosh Nayyar , Pierluigi Nuzzo

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has shown great empirical success in various application domains. The theoretical aspects of the problem have been extensively studied over past decades, particularly under tabular and linear Markov Decision…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-24 Sattar Vakili

We study Thompson Sampling-based algorithms for stochastic bandits with bounded rewards. As the existing problem-dependent regret bound for Thompson Sampling with Gaussian priors [Agrawal and Goyal, 2017] is vacuous when $T \le 288 e^{64}$,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-03 Bingshan Hu , Zhiming Huang , Tianyue H. Zhang , Mathias Lécuyer , Nidhi Hegde

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

We seek to understand what facilitates sample-efficient learning from historical datasets for sequential decision-making, a problem that is popularly known as offline reinforcement learning (RL). Further, we are interested in algorithms…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-07 Thanh Nguyen-Tang , Raman Arora

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

Understanding how to efficiently learn while adhering to safety constraints is essential for using online reinforcement learning in practical applications. However, proving rigorous regret bounds for safety-constrained reinforcement…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-04-29 Benjamin Schiffer , Lucas Janson

We study infinite-horizon average-reward reinforcement learning (RL) for Lipschitz MDPs, a broad class that subsumes several important classes such as linear and RKHS MDPs, function approximation frameworks, and develop an adaptive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Avik Kar , Rahul Singh