Related papers: Posterior Sampling Reinforcement Learning with Gau…

In this paper, we prove the first Bayesian regret bounds for Thompson Sampling in reinforcement learning in a multitude of settings. We simplify the learning problem using a discrete set of surrogate environments, and present a refined…

TWe establish regret lower bounds for adaptively controlling an unknown linear Gaussian system with quadratic costs. We combine ideas from experiment design, estimation theory and a perturbation bound of certain information matrices to…

A central problem in the theory of empirical Bayes is to control the regret (excess risk) of a learned Bayes rule by the Hellinger distance between the estimated and true marginal densities. In the normal means model, the classical result…

Information-directed sampling (IDS) has revealed its potential as a data-efficient algorithm for reinforcement learning (RL). However, theoretical understanding of IDS for Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) is still limited. We develop novel…

Bayesian optimization usually assumes that a Bayesian prior is given. However, the strong theoretical guarantees in Bayesian optimization are often regrettably compromised in practice because of unknown parameters in the prior. In this…

We propose a practical non-episodic PSRL algorithm that unlike recent state-of-the-art PSRL algorithms uses a deterministic, model-independent episode switching schedule. Our algorithm termed deterministic schedule PSRL (DS-PSRL) is…

Gaussian process upper confidence bound (GP-UCB) is a theoretically established algorithm for Bayesian optimization (BO), where we assume the objective function $f$ follows a GP. One notable drawback of GP-UCB is that the theoretical…

Bayesian posterior sampling techniques have demonstrated superior empirical performance in many exploration-exploitation settings. However, their theoretical analysis remains a challenge, especially in complex settings like reinforcement…

Gaussian Processes (GPs) are widely employed in control and learning because of their principled treatment of uncertainty. However, tracking uncertainty for iterative, multi-step predictions in general leads to an analytically intractable…

Bayesian optimization (BO) with Gaussian process (GP) surrogate models is a powerful black-box optimization method. Acquisition functions are a critical part of a BO algorithm as they determine how the new samples are selected. Some of the…

We study an algorithm-independent, worst-case lower bound for the Gaussian process (GP) bandit problem in the frequentist setting, where the reward function is fixed and has a bounded norm in the known reproducing kernel Hilbert space…

The goal of this paper is to characterize Gaussian-Process optimization in the setting where the function domain is large relative to the number of admissible function evaluations, i.e., where it is impossible to find the global optimum. We…

Consider the sequential optimization of a continuous, possibly non-convex, and expensive to evaluate objective function $f$. The problem can be cast as a Gaussian Process (GP) bandit where $f$ lives in a reproducing kernel Hilbert space…

We study the Gaussian process (GP) bandit problem, whose goal is to minimize regret under an unknown reward function lying in some reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS). The maximum posterior variance analysis is vital in analyzing…

We derive sublinear regret bounds for undiscounted reinforcement learning in continuous state space. The proposed algorithm combines state aggregation with the use of upper confidence bounds for implementing optimism in the face of…

The problem of reinforcement learning in an unknown and discrete Markov Decision Process (MDP) under the average-reward criterion is considered, when the learner interacts with the system in a single stream of observations, starting from an…

Efficient Reinforcement Learning usually takes advantage of demonstration or good exploration strategy. By applying posterior sampling in model-free RL under the hypothesis of GP, we propose Gaussian Process Posterior Sampling Reinforcement…

Bayesian optimization (BO) is a widely used iterative black-box optimization method that utilizes Gaussian process (GP) surrogate models. In practice, BO is typically terminated after a fixed evaluation budget is exhausted, which can incur…

Posterior sampling allows exploitation of prior knowledge on the environment's transition dynamics to improve the sample efficiency of reinforcement learning. The prior is typically specified as a class of parametric distributions, the…

Learning in POMDPs is known to be significantly harder than in MDPs. In this paper, we consider the online learning problem for episodic POMDPs with unknown transition and observation models. We propose a Posterior Sampling-based…