English
Related papers

Related papers: Bellman Unbiasedness: Toward Provably Efficient Di…

200 papers

Reinforcement learning algorithms are usually stated without theoretical guarantees regarding their performance. Recently, Jin, Yang, Wang, and Jordan (COLT 2020) showed a polynomial-time reinforcement learning algorithm (namely, LSVI-UCB)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-19 Philips George John , Arnab Bhattacharyya , Silviu Maniu , Dimitrios Myrisiotis , Zhenan Wu

Finding optimal policies which maximize long term rewards of Markov Decision Processes requires the use of dynamic programming and backward induction to solve the Bellman optimality equation. However, many real-world problems require…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-10 Mridul Agarwal , Vaneet Aggarwal

Existing episodic reinforcement algorithms assume that the length of an episode is fixed across time and known a priori. In this paper, we consider a general framework of episodic reinforcement learning when the length of each episode is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-08 Debmalya Mandal , Goran Radanovic , Jiarui Gan , Adish Singla , Rupak Majumdar

We study off-policy reinforcement learning for controlling continuous-time Markov diffusion processes with discrete-time observations and actions. We consider model-free algorithms with function approximation that learn value and advantage…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-17 Wenlong Mou

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) tackles sequential decision-making problems by creating agents that interacts with their environment. However, existing algorithms often view these problem as static, focusing on point estimates for model…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-03-21 Frank Shih , Faming Liang

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

We propose a model-free reinforcement learning algorithm inspired by the popular randomized least squares value iteration (RLSVI) algorithm as well as the optimism principle. Unlike existing upper-confidence-bound (UCB) based approaches,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-27 Haque Ishfaq , Qiwen Cui , Viet Nguyen , Alex Ayoub , Zhuoran Yang , Zhaoran Wang , Doina Precup , Lin F. Yang

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has gained substantial attention across diverse application domains and theoretical investigations. Existing literature on RL theory largely focuses on risk-neutral settings where the decision-maker learns to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-24 Zhengqi Wu , Renyuan Xu

We propose randomized least-squares value iteration (RLSVI) -- a new reinforcement learning algorithm designed to explore and generalize efficiently via linearly parameterized value functions. We explain why versions of least-squares value…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2016-02-16 Ian Osband , Benjamin Van Roy , Zheng Wen

We consider online reinforcement learning in episodic Markov decision process (MDP) with unknown transition function and stochastic rewards drawn from some fixed but unknown distribution. The learner aims to learn the optimal policy and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-12 Vincent Leon , S. Rasoul Etesami

We consider the problem of learning to optimize an unknown Markov decision process (MDP). We show that, if the MDP can be parameterized within some known function class, we can obtain regret bounds that scale with the dimensionality, rather…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2014-11-04 Ian Osband , Benjamin Van Roy

This paper develops an online inverse reinforcement learning algorithm aimed at efficiently recovering a reward function from ongoing observations of an agent's actions. To reduce the computation time and storage space in reward estimation,…

Robotics · Computer Science 2017-08-01 Kun Li , Joel W. Burdick

Deep reinforcement learning has achieved impressive successes yet often requires a very large amount of interaction data. This result is perhaps unsurprising, as using complicated function approximation often requires more data to fit, and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-20 Jonathan N. Lee , Aldo Pacchiano , Vidya Muthukumar , Weihao Kong , Emma Brunskill

Traditional reinforcement learning (RL) assumes the agents make decisions based on Markov decision processes (MDPs) with one-step transition models. In many real-world applications, such as energy management and stock investment, agents can…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-22 Chenbei Lu , Zaiwei Chen , Tongxin Li , Chenye Wu , Adam Wierman

Optimal probabilistic approach in reinforcement learning is computationally infeasible. Its simplification consisting in neglecting difference between true environment and its model estimated using limited number of observations causes…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2013-06-26 Sergey Rodionov , Alexey Potapov , Yurii Vinogradov

The distributional reinforcement learning (RL) approach advocates for representing the complete probability distribution of the random return instead of only modelling its expectation. A distributional RL algorithm may be characterised by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-20 Thibaut Théate , Antoine Wehenkel , Adrien Bolland , Gilles Louppe , Damien Ernst

In recent years deep neural networks have been successfully applied to the domains of reinforcement learning \cite{bengio2009learning,krizhevsky2012imagenet,hinton2006reducing}. Deep reinforcement learning \cite{mnih2015human} is reported…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-05-19 Huihui Zhang , Wu Huang

We design a new provably efficient algorithm for episodic reinforcement learning with generalized linear function approximation. We analyze the algorithm under a new expressivity assumption that we call "optimistic closure," which is…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-12-10 Yining Wang , Ruosong Wang , Simon S. Du , Akshay Krishnamurthy

Learning a predictive model of the mean return, or value function, plays a critical role in many reinforcement learning algorithms. Distributional reinforcement learning (DRL) has been shown to improve performance by modeling the value…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-08 Ju-Seung Byun , Andrew Perrault