Related papers: Provably Adaptive Average Reward Reinforcement Lea…
Deep reinforcement learning (RL) works impressively in some environments and fails catastrophically in others. Ideally, RL theory should be able to provide an understanding of why this is, i.e. bounds predictive of practical performance.…
We study the problem of deployment efficient reinforcement learning (RL) with linear function approximation under the \emph{reward-free} exploration setting. This is a well-motivated problem because deploying new policies is costly in…
Traditional reinforcement learning (RL) aims to maximize the expected total reward, while the risk of uncertain outcomes needs to be controlled to ensure reliable performance in a risk-averse setting. In this paper, we consider the problem…
We establish that an optimistic variant of Q-learning applied to a fixed-horizon episodic Markov decision process with an aggregated state representation incurs regret $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(\sqrt{H^5 M K} + \epsilon HK)$, where $H$ is the…
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…
This paper studies the discrete-time linear-quadratic-Gaussian mean field (MF) social control problem in an infinite horizon, where the dynamics of all agents are unknown. The objective is to design a reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm…
We study the problem of adaptive control of a high dimensional linear quadratic (LQ) system. Previous work established the asymptotic convergence to an optimal controller for various adaptive control schemes. More recently, for the average…
We develop a novel family of algorithms for the online learning setting with regret against any data sequence bounded by the empirical Rademacher complexity of that sequence. To develop a general theory of when this type of adaptive regret…
Reward shaping is an effective technique for incorporating domain knowledge into reinforcement learning (RL). Existing approaches such as potential-based reward shaping normally make full use of a given shaping reward function. However,…
A central issue lying at the heart of online reinforcement learning (RL) is data efficiency. While a number of recent works achieved asymptotically minimal regret in online RL, the optimality of these results is only guaranteed in a…
We consider the problem of preference based reinforcement learning (PbRL), where, unlike traditional reinforcement learning, an agent receives feedback only in terms of a 1 bit (0/1) preference over a trajectory pair instead of absolute…
Compositional generalization in sequential decision-making requires identifying which parts of prior rollouts remain useful for new tasks. Existing methods reuse skills or predictive models, but often overlook rich local transition geometry…
We study reinforcement learning with linear function approximation and adversarially changing cost functions, a setup that has mostly been considered under simplifying assumptions such as full information feedback or exploratory…
Motivated by personalized healthcare and other applications involving sensitive data, we study online exploration in reinforcement learning with differential privacy (DP) constraints. Existing work on this problem established that no-regret…
Adaptive context compression is vital for scaling Large Language Models (LLMs) to complex, multi-turn agent tasks. However, rule-based compression methods may discard task-critical nuances, while Reinforcement Learning (RL) approaches…
We present an optimistic Q-learning algorithm for regret minimization in average reward reinforcement learning under an additional assumption on the underlying MDP that for all policies, the time to visit some frequent state $s_0$ is finite…
This paper initiates the study of scale-free learning in Markov Decision Processes (MDPs), where the scale of rewards/losses is unknown to the learner. We design a generic algorithmic framework, \underline{S}cale \underline{C}lipping…
Alignment is vital for safely deploying large language models (LLMs). Existing techniques are either reward-based (training a reward model on preference pairs and optimizing with reinforcement learning) or reward-free (directly fine-tuning…
Recently, we have struck the balance between the information freshness, in terms of age of information (AoI), experienced by users and energy consumed by sensors, by appropriately activating sensors to update their current status in caching…
We consider undiscounted reinforcement learning in Markov decision processes (MDPs) where both the reward functions and the state-transition probabilities may vary (gradually or abruptly) over time. For this problem setting, we propose an…