Related papers: Reinforcement Learning and Regret Bounds for Admis…
The dueling bandit is a learning framework wherein the feedback information in the learning process is restricted to a noisy comparison between a pair of actions. In this research, we address a dueling bandit problem based on a cost…
We consider the setting of iterative learning control, or model-based policy learning in the presence of uncertain, time-varying dynamics. In this setting, we propose a new performance metric, planning regret, which replaces the standard…
We revisit the classic regret-minimization problem in the stochastic multi-armed bandit setting when the arm-distributions are allowed to be heavy-tailed. Regret minimization has been well studied in simpler settings of either bounded…
Policy learning in modern operations environments faces a fundamental tension between limited operational data and the large, often continuous, state and action spaces over which good decisions must be identified and deployed. We study…
The standard assumption in reinforcement learning (RL) is that agents observe feedback for their actions immediately. However, in practice feedback is often observed in delay. This paper studies online learning in episodic Markov decision…
Stochastic shortest path (SSP) is a well-known problem in planning and control, in which an agent has to reach a goal state in minimum total expected cost. In the learning formulation of the problem, the agent is unaware of the environment…
We present a reduction from reinforcement learning (RL) to no-regret online learning based on the saddle-point formulation of RL, by which "any" online algorithm with sublinear regret can generate policies with provable performance…
This paper is concerned with understanding and countering the effects of database attacks on a learning-based linear quadratic adaptive controller. This attack targets neither sensors nor actuators, but just poisons the learning algorithm…
We analyze the Bayesian regret of the Gaussian process posterior sampling reinforcement learning (GP-PSRL) algorithm. Posterior sampling is an effective heuristic for decision-making under uncertainty that has been used to develop…
We consider an online two-stage stochastic optimization with long-term constraints over a finite horizon of $T$ periods. At each period, we take the first-stage action, observe a model parameter realization and then take the second-stage…
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…
Strong worst-case performance bounds for episodic reinforcement learning exist but fortunately in practice RL algorithms perform much better than such bounds would predict. Algorithms and theory that provide strong problem-dependent bounds…
TWe establish regret lower bounds for adaptively controlling an unknown linear Gaussian system with quadratic costs. We combine ideas from experiment design, estimation theory and a perturbation bound of certain information matrices to…
Building on the framework introduced by Xu and Raginksy [1] for supervised learning problems, we study the best achievable performance for model-based Bayesian reinforcement learning problems. With this purpose, we define minimum Bayesian…
We provide an algorithm that achieves the optimal regret rate in an unknown weakly communicating Markov Decision Process (MDP). The algorithm proceeds in episodes where, in each episode, it picks a policy using regularization based on the…
The Linear-Quadratic Regulation (LQR) problem with unknown system parameters has been widely studied, but it has remained unclear whether $\tilde{ \mathcal{O}}(\sqrt{T})$ regret, which is the best known dependence on time, can be achieved…
We study online reinforcement learning in average-reward stochastic games (SGs). An SG models a two-player zero-sum game in a Markov environment, where state transitions and one-step payoffs are determined simultaneously by a learner and an…
We study online learning with oblivious losses and delays under a novel ``capacity constraint'' that limits how many past rounds can be tracked simultaneously for delayed feedback. Under ``clairvoyance'' (i.e., delay durations are revealed…
In this paper we consider multi-objective reinforcement learning where the objectives are balanced using preferences. In practice, the preferences are often given in an adversarial manner, e.g., customers can be picky in many applications.…
Reinforcement learning (RL) so far has limited real-world applications. One key challenge is that typical RL algorithms heavily rely on a reset mechanism to sample proper initial states; these reset mechanisms, in practice, are expensive to…