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arXiv research

A locally-built, LLM-digested index of recent arXiv papers in quant finance, geometry/topology, and statistical ML — keyword search served straight from SQLite on this machine.

168,657 papers · 148 categories

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255176101 · Jun 202019922001200920172026
48 results for episodic rewards

Paper proposes RRD to learn proxy rewards for sparse delayed rewards in episodic reinforcement learning.

problem Learning from sparse and delayed rewards in reinforcement learning.
method Randomized Return Decomposition (RRD) algorithm to redistribute rewards.
result Substantial improvement over baseline algorithms in experiments.

This paper explores how environmental properties can simplify reinforcement learning in non-episodic settings.

problem Challenges in reinforcement learning with continuous interaction and sparse delayed rewards.
method Analysis of environment shaping and dynamism properties to simplify learning.
result Properties like environment shaping and dynamism can significantly ease learning in non-episodic, sparse reward settings.

New algorithm for average reward learning with bounded hitting time assumption.

problem Minimizing regret in average reward reinforcement learning with bounded hitting time.
method Optimistic Q-learning with a novel L\overline{L} operator for bounded hitting time.
result Regret bound of ildeO(H5SAT) ilde{O}(H^5 S\sqrt{AT}) for average reward learning.

The success of popular algorithms for deep reinforcement learning, such as policy-gradients and Q-learning, relies heavily on the availability of an informative reward signal at each timestep of the sequential decision-making process. When rewards are only sparsely available during an episode, or a rewarding feedback i…

2018-05-25abs ↗pdf ↗

This paper studies poisoning attacks in episodic RL and discovers their effectiveness depends on reward bounds.

problem Understanding security threats to RL algorithms through poisoning attacks.
method Examined two types of poisoning attacks: reward and action manipulation, in bounded and unbounded reward settings.
result The effectiveness of poisoning attacks depends on reward bounds, with different attack costs and success rates.

State of the art deep reinforcement learning algorithms take many millions of interactions to attain human-level performance. Humans, on the other hand, can very quickly exploit highly rewarding nuances of an environment upon first discovery. In the brain, such rapid learning is thought to depend on the hippocampus and…

2016-06-14abs ↗pdf ↗

We introduce a new class of reinforcement learning methods referred to as {\em episodic multi-armed bandits} (eMAB). In eMAB the learner proceeds in {\em episodes}, each composed of several {\em steps}, in which it chooses an action and observes a feedback signal. Moreover, in each step, it can take a special action, c…

2015-08-04abs ↗pdf ↗

Algorithm learns near-optimal policies for reward-mixing MDPs with few latent contexts.

problem Episodic reinforcement learning in reward-mixing Markov decision processes with a few latent contexts.
method Sample-efficient algorithm EM^2 using higher-order method-of-moments approach.
result Provides an ε-optimal policy using O(ε^(-2) * S^d A^d * poly(H, Z)^d) episodes for arbitrary M ≥ 2.

Algorithm tackles constrained reinforcement learning with concave-convex and knapsack constraints.

problem Constrained episodic reinforcement learning with concave rewards and convex constraints.
method Modular analysis with strong theoretical guarantees for concave-convex and knapsack settings.
result Significantly outperforms existing approaches in constrained episodic environments.

New rule reduces exploration regret to logarithmic, improving bad episode handling.

problem Improving exploration regret in average reward MDPs.
method Replacing Doubling Trick with Vanishing Multiplicative rule in EVI-based algorithms.
result Regret is logarithmic under the new rule, significantly better than linear.

New RL algorithm tackles adversarial RMAB with unknown transitions and bandit feedback.

problem Learning in episodic RMAB with unknown transition functions and adversarial rewards.
method Developed a novel RL algorithm with a biased reward estimator and an index policy.
result Achieved ildeO(HT) ilde{\mathcal{O}}(H\sqrt{T}) regret bound for adversarial RMAB.

Transfer and adaptation to new unknown environmental dynamics is a key challenge for reinforcement learning (RL). An even greater challenge is performing near-optimally in a single attempt at test time, possibly without access to dense rewards, which is not addressed by current methods that require multiple experience …

2019-10-17abs ↗pdf ↗

Reinforcement learning (RL) has traditionally been understood from an episodic perspective; the concept of non-episodic RL, where there is no restart and therefore no reliable recovery, remains elusive. A fundamental question in non-episodic RL is how to measure the performance of a learner and derive algorithms to max…

2020-02-12abs ↗pdf ↗

Rewards are sparse in the real world and most of today's reinforcement learning algorithms struggle with such sparsity. One solution to this problem is to allow the agent to create rewards for itself - thus making rewards dense and more suitable for learning. In particular, inspired by curious behaviour in animals, obs…

2018-10-04abs ↗pdf ↗

Reinforcement learning algorithms use correlations between policies and rewards to improve agent performance. But in dynamic or sparsely rewarding environments these correlations are often too small, or rewarding events are too infrequent to make learning feasible. Human education instead relies on curricula--the break…

2019-09-27abs ↗pdf ↗

We propose a new method for learning from a single demonstration to solve hard exploration tasks like the Atari game Montezuma's Revenge. Instead of imitating human demonstrations, as proposed in other recent works, our approach is to maximize rewards directly. Our agent is trained using off-the-shelf reinforcement lea…

2018-12-08abs ↗pdf ↗

We initiate the study of multi-stage episodic reinforcement learning under adversarial corruptions in both the rewards and the transition probabilities of the underlying system extending recent results for the special case of stochastic bandits. We provide a framework which modifies the aggressive exploration enjoyed b…

2019-11-20abs ↗pdf ↗

A new algorithm for offline RL with trajectory-wise reward reduces bias and variance errors.

problem Offline RL with trajectory-wise reward incurs large bias and variance errors.
method PARTED algorithm that decomposes trajectory return into proxy rewards and performs pessimistic value iteration.
result PARTED achieves provably efficient suboptimality bounds in general MDPs with trajectory-wise reward.

New method trains GFlowNets from partial episodes to improve convergence and stability.

problem Improving convergence and stability of GFlowNets training.
method Introducing SubTB(λλ) for GFlowNet training from partial action subsequences.
result SubTB(λλ) accelerates GFlowNet convergence and enables training in longer action sequences.

Algorithm for online learning in MDPs with linear function approximation and bandit feedback.

problem Online learning in MDPs with changing reward functions and limited feedback.
method Developed MDP-LinExp3 algorithm with theoretical guarantees.
result Proved regret bounds for MDP-LinExp3 algorithm.

Two algorithms tackle heavy-tailed rewards in reinforcement learning with linear function approximation.

problem Online sequential decision-making with heavy-tailed rewards.
method AdaOFUL and VARA algorithms for linear stochastic bandits and MDPs, using modified adaptive Huber regression.
result Achieved state-of-the-art and variance-aware regret bounds for heavy-tailed rewards.

Restless bandit problems assume time-varying reward distributions of the arms, which adds flexibility to the model but makes the analysis more challenging. We study learning algorithms over the unknown reward distributions and prove a sub-linear, O(TlogT)O(\sqrt{T}\log T), regret bound for a variant of Thompson sampling. Our…

2019-10-12abs ↗pdf ↗

Proposes PIC and POIC for measuring task difficulty in RL.

problem Lack of metrics to measure task difficulty in RL.
method Introduces policy information capacity (PIC) and policy-optimal information capacity (POIC) as metrics based on mutual information.
result Empirically shows PIC and POIC correlate with task solvability better than alternatives.

We propose a new reinforcement learning algorithm for partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDP) based on spectral decomposition methods. While spectral methods have been previously employed for consistent learning of (passive) latent variable models such as hidden Markov models, POMDPs are more challenging…

2016-02-25abs ↗pdf ↗

Align-RUDDER improves reinforcement learning with few demonstrations by redistributing rewards.

problem Learning complex tasks with sparse and delayed rewards using few demonstrations.
method Align-RUDDER uses a profile model for reward redistribution based on multiple sequence alignment of demonstrations.
result Align-RUDDER outperforms competitors on complex tasks with few demonstrations.

Improved reinforcement learning for episodes with varying action sets.

problem Reinforcement learning with context-dependent action sets.
method Extends MVP algorithm to handle adversarial and stochastic contexts.
result Established minimax regret bounds of O(SAH3KlogL)O(\sqrt{SAH^3K\log L}) for adversarial contexts.

Algorithm improves RL model selection for repeated games with utility maximization.

problem Optimal policy learning in repeated games with unknown opponent strategy.
method Proposes MRBEAR for average reward RL, applying to utility maximization in repeated games.
result Regret bound shows linear dependence on number of model classes in average reward RL.

New algorithm reduces dynamic regret for MDPs with unknown transition and adversarial rewards.

problem Episodic linear mixture MDPs with unknown transition and adversarial rewards.
method Combines occupancy-measure-based global optimization and policy-based variance-aware value-targeted regression.
result Achieves near-optimal dynamic regret of O~(dH3K+HK(H+PˉK))\widetilde{\mathcal{O}}(d \sqrt{H^3 K} + \sqrt{HK(H + \bar{P}_K)}).

Efficient algorithm for learning from indirect feedback in complex decision-making scenarios.

problem Learning from indirect feedback in realistic scenarios with personalized mechanisms.
method IGW algorithm for policy optimization, extending reward-estimator construction from single-step to multi-step.
result Achieves sublinear regret guarantee for contextual episodic MDPs with personalized feedback.