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This paper addresses the problem of learning to sparsify stochastic linear bandits, where a decision-maker sequentially selects actions from a high-dimensional space subject to a sparsity constraint on the number of nonzero elements in the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Zhengmiao Wang , Ming Chi , Zhi-Wei Liu , Lintao Ye , Carla Fabiana Chiasserini

A fundamental question in the theory of reinforcement learning is: suppose the optimal $Q$-function lies in the linear span of a given $d$ dimensional feature mapping, is sample-efficient reinforcement learning (RL) possible? The recent and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-22 Yuanhao Wang , Ruosong Wang , Sham M. Kakade

We investigate the high-dimensional sparse linear bandits problem in a data-poor regime where the time horizon is much smaller than the ambient dimension and number of arms. We study the setting under the additional blocking constraint…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-30 Adit Jain , Soumyabrata Pal , Sunav Choudhary , Ramasuri Narayanam , Harshita Chopra , Vikram Krishnamurthy

Recently, there has been remarkable progress in reinforcement learning (RL) with general function approximation. However, all these works only provide regret or sample complexity guarantees. It is still an open question if one can achieve…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-16 Yue Wu , Jiafan He , Quanquan Gu

We study model selection in linear bandits, where the learner must adapt to the dimension (denoted by $d_\star$) of the smallest hypothesis class containing the true linear model while balancing exploration and exploitation. Previous papers…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-03-17 Yinglun Zhu , Robert Nowak

Offline or batch reinforcement learning seeks to learn a near-optimal policy using history data without active exploration of the environment. To counter the insufficient coverage and sample scarcity of many offline datasets, the principle…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-14 Laixi Shi , Gen Li , Yuting Wei , Yuxin Chen , Yuejie Chi

We consider the question of learning $Q$-function in a sample efficient manner for reinforcement learning with continuous state and action spaces under a generative model. If $Q$-function is Lipschitz continuous, then the minimal sample…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-12 Devavrat Shah , Dogyoon Song , Zhi Xu , Yuzhe Yang

We present a model-based offline reinforcement learning policy performance lower bound that explicitly captures dynamics model misspecification and distribution mismatch and we propose an empirical algorithm for optimal offline policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-30 Kefan Dong , Yannis Flet-Berliac , Allen Nie , Emma Brunskill

We study the problem of Reinforcement Learning (RL) with linear function approximation, i.e. assuming the optimal action-value function is linear in a known $d$-dimensional feature mapping. Unfortunately, however, based on only this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-15 Zeyu Jia , Randy Jia , Dhruv Madeka , Dean P. Foster

We study oblivious sketching for $k$-sparse linear regression under various loss functions such as an $\ell_p$ norm, or from a broad class of hinge-like loss functions, which includes the logistic and ReLU losses. We show that for sparse…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2023-04-06 Tung Mai , Alexander Munteanu , Cameron Musco , Anup B. Rao , Chris Schwiegelshohn , David P. Woodruff

Estimating linear, mean-square continuous functionals is a pivotal challenge in statistics. In high-dimensional contexts, this estimation is often performed under the assumption of exact model sparsity, meaning that only a small number of…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-08-04 Jelena Bradic , Victor Chernozhukov , Whitney K. Newey , Yinchu Zhu

We study the best-arm identification problem in sparse linear bandits under the fixed-budget setting. In sparse linear bandits, the unknown feature vector $\theta^*$ may be of large dimension $d$, but only a few, say $s \ll d$ of these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-02 Recep Can Yavas , Vincent Y. F. Tan

This paper studies the statistical theory of batch data reinforcement learning with function approximation. Consider the off-policy evaluation problem, which is to estimate the cumulative value of a new target policy from logged history…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-25 Yaqi Duan , Mengdi Wang

In sparse linear bandits, a learning agent sequentially selects an action and receive reward feedback, and the reward function depends linearly on a few coordinates of the covariates of the actions. This has applications in many real-world…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-11-21 Kyoungseok Jang , Chicheng Zhang , Kwang-Sung Jun

This paper studies offline reinforcement learning with linear function approximation in a setting with decision-theoretic, but not estimation sparsity. The structural restrictions of the data-generating process presume that the transitions…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-01-24 Angela Zhou

For the problem of task-agnostic reinforcement learning (RL), an agent first collects samples from an unknown environment without the supervision of reward signals, then is revealed with a reward and is asked to compute a corresponding…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-16 Jingfeng Wu , Vladimir Braverman , Lin F. Yang

We consider the problem of learning an $\varepsilon$-optimal policy in a general class of continuous-space Markov decision processes (MDPs) having smooth Bellman operators. Given access to a generative model, we achieve rate-optimal sample…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-13 Davide Maran , Alberto Maria Metelli , Matteo Papini , Marcello Restelli

We introduce the problem of model selection for contextual bandits, where a learner must adapt to the complexity of the optimal policy while balancing exploration and exploitation. Our main result is a new model selection guarantee for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-15 Dylan J. Foster , Akshay Krishnamurthy , Haipeng Luo

The sparse regression problem, also known as best subset selection problem, can be cast as follows: Given a set $S$ of $n$ points in $\mathbb{R}^d$, a point $y\in \mathbb{R}^d$, and an integer $2 \leq k \leq d$, find an affine combination…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2020-01-01 Jean Cardinal , Aurélien Ooms

We study linear bandits when the underlying reward function is not linear. Existing work relies on a uniform misspecification parameter $\epsilon$ that measures the sup-norm error of the best linear approximation. This results in an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-21 Chong Liu , Ming Yin , Yu-Xiang Wang