English
Related papers

Related papers: Tighter Regret Bounds for Contextual Action-Set Re…

200 papers

We study linear contextual bandits in the misspecified setting, where the expected reward function can be approximated by a linear function class up to a bounded misspecification level $\zeta>0$. We propose an algorithm based on a novel…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-17 Weitong Zhang , Jiafan He , Zhiyuan Fan , Quanquan Gu

We study reinforcement learning in an infinite-horizon average-reward setting with linear function approximation, where the transition probability function of the underlying Markov Decision Process (MDP) admits a linear form over a feature…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-11 Yue Wu , Dongruo Zhou , Quanquan Gu

In order to make good decision under uncertainty an agent must learn from observations. To do so, two of the most common frameworks are Contextual Bandits and Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). In this paper, we study whether there exist…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-05 Andrea Zanette , Emma Brunskill

We investigate the problem of cumulative regret minimization for individual sequence prediction with respect to the best expert in a finite family of size K under limited access to information. We assume that in each round, the learner can…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2022-10-06 El Mehdi Saad , G. Blanchard

In the contextual linear bandit setting, algorithms built on the optimism principle fail to exploit the structure of the problem and have been shown to be asymptotically suboptimal. In this paper, we follow recent approaches of deriving…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-23 Andrea Tirinzoni , Matteo Pirotta , Marcello Restelli , Alessandro Lazaric

Many works have developed no-regret algorithms for contextual bandits with function approximation, where the mean reward function over context-action pairs belongs to a function class. Although there are many approaches to this problem, one…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-18 Aldo Pacchiano

Regret bounds in online learning compare the player's performance to $L^*$, the optimal performance in hindsight with a fixed strategy. Typically such bounds scale with the square root of the time horizon $T$. The more refined concept of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-02-12 Zeyuan Allen-Zhu , Sébastien Bubeck , Yuanzhi Li

Deep reinforcement learning has achieved impressive successes yet often requires a very large amount of interaction data. This result is perhaps unsurprising, as using complicated function approximation often requires more data to fit, and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-20 Jonathan N. Lee , Aldo Pacchiano , Vidya Muthukumar , Weihao Kong , Emma Brunskill

We study finite episodic Markov decision processes incorporating dynamic risk measures to capture risk sensitivity. To this end, we present two model-based algorithms applied to \emph{Lipschitz} dynamic risk measures, a wide range of risk…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-06 Hao Liang , Zhi-quan Luo

We consider reinforcement learning (RL) in Markov Decision Processes in which an agent repeatedly interacts with an environment that is modeled by a controlled Markov process. At each time step $t$, it earns a reward, and also incurs a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-16 Rahul Singh , Abhishek Gupta , Ness B. Shroff

We study online learning in repeated first-price auctions where a bidder, only observing the winning bid at the end of each auction, learns to adaptively bid in order to maximize her cumulative payoff. To achieve this goal, the bidder faces…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-06 Yanjun Han , Zhengyuan Zhou , Tsachy Weissman

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-13 Qiwei Di , Jiafan He , Quanquan Gu

This paper presents the first non-asymptotic result showing that a model-free algorithm can achieve a logarithmic cumulative regret for episodic tabular reinforcement learning if there exists a strictly positive sub-optimality gap in the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-24 Kunhe Yang , Lin F. Yang , Simon S. Du

Existing episodic reinforcement algorithms assume that the length of an episode is fixed across time and known a priori. In this paper, we consider a general framework of episodic reinforcement learning when the length of each episode is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-08 Debmalya Mandal , Goran Radanovic , Jiarui Gan , Adish Singla , Rupak Majumdar

We study the $K$-armed contextual dueling bandit problem, a sequential decision making setting in which the learner uses contextual information to make two decisions, but only observes \emph{preference-based feedback} suggesting that one…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-25 Aadirupa Saha , Akshay Krishnamurthy

This work studies the problem of sequential control in an unknown, nonlinear dynamical system, where we model the underlying system dynamics as an unknown function in a known Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Space. This framework yields a general…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-23 Sham Kakade , Akshay Krishnamurthy , Kendall Lowrey , Motoya Ohnishi , Wen Sun

In recent years, significant attention has been directed towards learning average-reward Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). However, existing algorithms either suffer from sub-optimal regret guarantees or computational inefficiencies. In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-04 Victor Boone , Zihan Zhang

We study the framework of universal dynamic regret minimization with strongly convex losses. We answer an open problem in Baby and Wang 2021 by showing that in a proper learning setup, Strongly Adaptive algorithms can achieve the near…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-25 Dheeraj Baby , Yu-Xiang Wang

In safety-critical applications of reinforcement learning such as healthcare and robotics, it is often desirable to optimize risk-sensitive objectives that account for tail outcomes rather than expected reward. We prove the first regret…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-12 O. Bastani , Y. J. Ma , E. Shen , W. Xu

It is well-known that for sparse linear bandits, when ignoring the dependency on sparsity which is much smaller than the ambient dimension, the worst-case minimax regret is $\widetilde{\Theta}\left(\sqrt{dT}\right)$ where $d$ is the ambient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-08 Yan Dai , Ruosong Wang , Simon S. Du