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Learning from human feedback plays an important role in aligning generative models, such as large language models (LLM). However, the effectiveness of this approach can be influenced by adversaries, who may intentionally provide misleading…
Value function approximation is important in modern reinforcement learning (RL) problems especially when the state space is (infinitely) large. Despite the importance and wide applicability of value function approximation, its theoretical…
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…
Safety in reinforcement learning has become increasingly important in recent years. Yet, existing solutions either fail to strictly avoid choosing unsafe actions, which may lead to catastrophic results in safety-critical systems, or fail to…
We study the challenging exploration incentive problem in both bandit and reinforcement learning, where the rewards are scale-free and potentially unbounded, driven by real-world scenarios and differing from existing work. Past works in…
We derive instance-dependent tail bounds for the regret of optimism-based reinforcement learning in finite-horizon tabular Markov decision processes with unknown transition dynamics. We first study a UCBVI-type (model-based) algorithm and…
To tackle long planning horizon problems in reinforcement learning with general function approximation, we propose the first algorithm, termed as UCRL-WVTR, that achieves both \emph{horizon-free} and \emph{instance-dependent}, since it…
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…
We consider the exploration-exploitation dilemma in finite-horizon reinforcement learning (RL). When the state space is large or continuous, traditional tabular approaches are unfeasible and some form of function approximation is mandatory.…
Hybrid Reinforcement Learning (RL), where an agent learns from both an offline dataset and online explorations in an unknown environment, has garnered significant recent interest. A crucial question posed by Xie et al. (2022) is whether…
We study reinforcement learning (RL) with linear function approximation. Existing algorithms for this problem only have high-probability regret and/or Probably Approximately Correct (PAC) sample complexity guarantees, which cannot guarantee…
We study regret minimization for reinforcement learning (RL) in Latent Markov Decision Processes (LMDPs) with context in hindsight. We design a novel model-based algorithmic framework which can be instantiated with both a model-optimistic…
Recent studies in reinforcement learning (RL) have made significant progress by leveraging function approximation to alleviate the sample complexity hurdle for better performance. Despite the success, existing provably efficient algorithms…
We study the stochastic shortest path (SSP) problem in reinforcement learning with linear function approximation, where the transition kernel is represented as a linear mixture of unknown models. We call this class of SSP problems as linear…
Statistical performance bounds for reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms can be critical for high-stakes applications like healthcare. This paper introduces a new framework for theoretically measuring the performance of such algorithms…
We develop a probabilistic framework for analysing model-based reinforcement learning in the episodic setting. We then apply it to study finite-time horizon stochastic control problems with linear dynamics but unknown coefficients and…
We propose a novel variant of the UCB algorithm (referred to as Efficient-UCB-Variance (EUCBV)) for minimizing cumulative regret in the stochastic multi-armed bandit (MAB) setting. EUCBV incorporates the arm elimination strategy proposed in…
We study online reinforcement learning in linear Markov decision processes with adversarial losses and bandit feedback, without prior knowledge on transitions or access to simulators. We introduce two algorithms that achieve improved regret…
We study stochastic linear bandits with heavy-tailed rewards, where the rewards have a finite $(1+\epsilon)$-absolute central moment bounded by $\upsilon$ for some $\epsilon \in (0,1]$. We improve both upper and lower bounds on the minimax…
In the classical multi-armed bandit problem, instance-dependent algorithms attain improved performance on "easy" problems with a gap between the best and second-best arm. Are similar guarantees possible for contextual bandits? While…