Related papers: On the Optimal Sample Complexity of Offline Multi-…
Recent studies have shown that reinforcement learning with KL-regularized objectives can enjoy faster rates of convergence or logarithmic regret, in contrast to the classical $\sqrt{T}$-type regret in the unregularized setting. However, the…
Many offline reinforcement learning algorithms are underpinned by $f$-divergence regularization, but their sample complexity *defined with respect to regularized objectives* still lacks tight analyses, especially in terms of concrete data…
\emph{Kullback-Leibler} (KL) regularization is ubiquitous in reinforcement learning algorithms in the form of \emph{reverse} or \emph{forward} KL. Recent studies have demonstrated $\epsilon^{-1}$-type fast rates for decision making under…
Learning paradigms based purely on offline data as well as those based solely on sequential online learning have been well-studied in the literature. In this paper, we consider combining offline data with online learning, an area less…
We study the problem of $K$-armed bandits with reward distributions belonging to a one-parameter exponential distribution family. In the literature, several criteria have been proposed to evaluate the performance of such algorithms,…
We study $K$-armed bandit problems where the reward distributions of the arms are all supported on the $[0,1]$ interval. It has been a challenge to design regret-efficient randomized exploration algorithms in this setting. Maillard sampling…
Offline (or batch) reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms seek to learn an optimal policy from a fixed dataset without active data collection. Based on the composition of the offline dataset, two main categories of methods are used:…
Online machine learning (OML) algorithms do not need any training phase and can be deployed directly in an unknown environment. OML includes multi-armed bandit (MAB) algorithms that can identify the best arm among several arms by achieving…
The combinatorial multi-armed bandit (CMAB) is a fundamental sequential decision-making framework, extensively studied over the past decade. However, existing work primarily focuses on the online setting, overlooking the substantial costs…
We consider a Kullback-Leibler-based algorithm for the stochastic multi-armed bandit problem in the case of distributions with finite supports (not necessarily known beforehand), whose asymptotic regret matches the lower bound of…
Recent advances in Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) have shown that KL-regularization plays a pivotal role in improving the efficiency of RL fine-tuning for large language models (LLMs). Despite its empirical advantage, the…
Large pre-trained models, such as Bert, GPT, and Wav2Vec, have demonstrated great potential for learning representations that are transferable to a wide variety of downstream tasks . It is difficult to obtain a large quantity of supervised…
Empirical risk minimization, a cornerstone in machine learning, is often hindered by the Optimizer's Curse stemming from discrepancies between the empirical and true data-generating distributions.To address this challenge, the robust…
We consider optimal sequential allocation in the context of the so-called stochastic multi-armed bandit model. We describe a generic index policy, in the sense of Gittins [J. R. Stat. Soc. Ser. B Stat. Methodol. 41 (1979) 148-177], based on…
Online interactions with the environment to collect data samples for training a Reinforcement Learning (RL) agent is not always feasible due to economic and safety concerns. The goal of Offline Reinforcement Learning is to address this…
Recent Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms making use of Kullback-Leibler (KL) regularization as a core component have shown outstanding performance. Yet, only little is understood theoretically about why KL regularization helps, so far.…
This paper concerns the central issues of model robustness and sample efficiency in offline reinforcement learning (RL), which aims to learn to perform decision making from history data without active exploration. Due to uncertainties and…
Reverse Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence-based regularization with respect to a fixed reference policy is widely used in modern reinforcement learning to preserve the desired traits of the reference policy and sometimes to promote…
We study a sequential decision problem where the learner faces a sequence of $K$-armed bandit tasks. The task boundaries might be known (the bandit meta-learning setting), or unknown (the non-stationary bandit setting). For a given integer…
We consider stochastic multi-armed bandit problems where the expected reward is a Lipschitz function of the arm, and where the set of arms is either discrete or continuous. For discrete Lipschitz bandits, we derive asymptotic problem…