Related papers: Provably Efficient Infinite-Horizon Average-Reward…
We derive a novel asymptotic problem-dependent lower-bound for regret minimization in finite-horizon tabular Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). While, similar to prior work (e.g., for ergodic MDPs), the lower-bound is the solution to an…
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…
This paper gives the first polynomial-time algorithm for tabular Markov Decision Processes (MDP) that enjoys a regret bound \emph{independent on the planning horizon}. Specifically, we consider tabular MDP with $S$ states, $A$ actions, a…
We consider an online learning problem where the learner interacts with a Markov decision process in a sequence of episodes, where the reward function is allowed to change between episodes in an adversarial manner and the learner only gets…
We propose a new regret minimization algorithm for episodic sparse linear Markov decision process (SMDP) where the state-transition distribution is a linear function of observed features. The only previously known algorithm for SMDP…
Any reinforcement learning algorithm that applies to all Markov decision processes (MDPs) will suffer $\Omega(\sqrt{SAT})$ regret on some MDP, where $T$ is the elapsed time and $S$ and $A$ are the cardinalities of the state and action…
We study a new class of MDPs that employs multinomial logit (MNL) function approximation to ensure valid probability distributions over the state space. Despite its significant benefits, incorporating the non-linear function raises…
Robust Markov decision processes (MDPs) address the challenge of model uncertainty by optimizing the worst-case performance over an uncertainty set of MDPs. In this paper, we focus on the robust average-reward MDPs under the model-free…
While learning in an unknown Markov Decision Process (MDP), an agent should trade off exploration to discover new information about the MDP, and exploitation of the current knowledge to maximize the reward. Although the agent will…
In online learning problems, exploiting low variance plays an important role in obtaining tight performance guarantees yet is challenging because variances are often not known a priori. Recently, considerable progress has been made by Zhang…
We study infinite-horizon average-reward constrained Markov decision processes (CMDPs) under the unichain assumption and general policy parameterizations. Existing regret analyses for constrained reinforcement learning largely rely on…
We introduce a novel approach to hierarchical reinforcement learning for Linearly-solvable Markov Decision Processes (LMDPs) in the infinite-horizon average-reward setting. Unlike previous work, our approach allows learning low-level and…
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…
A standard assumption in Reinforcement Learning is that the agent observes every visited state-action pair in the associated Markov Decision Process (MDP), along with the per-step rewards. Strong theoretical results are known in this…
Recent studies have shown that episodic reinforcement learning (RL) is no harder than bandits when the total reward is bounded by $1$, and proved regret bounds that have a polylogarithmic dependence on the planning horizon $H$. However, it…
We consider the gap-dependent regret bounds for episodic MDPs. We show that the Monotonic Value Propagation (MVP) algorithm achieves a variance-aware gap-dependent regret bound of $$\tilde{O}\left(\left(\sum_{\Delta_h(s,a)>0} \frac{H^2 \log…
This paper studies the safe reinforcement learning problem formulated as an episodic finite-horizon tabular constrained Markov decision process with an unknown transition kernel and stochastic reward and cost functions. We propose a…
This paper presents new \emph{variance-aware} confidence sets for linear bandits and linear mixture Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). With the new confidence sets, we obtain the follow regret bounds: For linear bandits, we obtain an…
We study reinforcement learning (RL) with linear function approximation where the underlying transition probability kernel of the Markov decision process (MDP) is a linear mixture model (Jia et al., 2020; Ayoub et al., 2020; Zhou et al.,…
We introduce \texttt{OPO-CMDP}, the first policy optimization algorithm for stochastic Contextual Markov Decision Process (CMDPs) under general offline function approximation. Our approach achieves a high probability regret bound of…