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Register a new userSimultaneously Learning Stochastic and Adversarial Episodic MDPs with Known Transition
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This work studies the problem of learning episodic Markov Decision Processes with known transition and bandit feedback. We develop the first algorithm with a ``best-of-both-worlds guarantee: it achieves $mathcal{O}(log T)$ regret when the losses are stochastic, and simultaneously enjoys worst-case robustness with $tilde{mathcal{O}}(sqrt{T})$ regret even when the losses are adversarial, where $T$ is the number of episodes. More generally, it achieves $tilde{mathcal{O}}(sqrt{C})$ regret in an intermediate setting where the losses are corrupted by a total amount of $C$. Our algorithm is based on the Follow-the-Regularized-Leader method from Zimin and Neu (2013), with a novel hybrid regularizer inspired by recent works of Zimmert et al. (2019a, 2019b) for the special case of multi-armed bandits. Crucially, our regularizer admits a non-diagonal Hessian with a highly complicated inverse. Analyzing such a regularizer and deriving a particular self-bounding regret guarantee is our key technical contribution and might be of independent interest.
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We consider the best-of-both-worlds problem for learning an episodic Markov Decision Process through $T$ episodes, with the goal of achieving $widetilde{mathcal{O}}(sqrt{T})$ regret when the losses are adversarial and simultaneously $mathcal{O}(text{polylog}(T))$ regret when the losses are (almost) stochastic. Recent work by [Jin and Luo, 2020] achieves this goal when the fixed transition is known, and leaves the case of unknown transition as a major open question. In this work, we resolve this open problem by using the same Follow-the-Regularized-Leader ($text{FTRL}$) framework together with a set of new techniques. Specifically, we first propose a loss-shifting trick in the $text{FTRL}$ analysis, which greatly simplifies the approach of [Jin and Luo, 2020] and already improves their results for the known transition case. Then, we extend this idea to the unknown transition case and develop a novel analysis which upper bounds the transition estimation error by (a fraction of) the regret itself in the stochastic setting, a key property to ensure $mathcal{O}(text{polylog}(T))$ regret.
We consider the problem of learning in episodic finite-horizon Markov decision processes with an unknown transition function, bandit feedback, and adversarial losses. We propose an efficient algorithm that achieves $mathcal{tilde{O}}(L|X|sqrt{|A|T})$ regret with high probability, where $L$ is the horizon, $|X|$ is the number of states, $|A|$ is the number of actions, and $T$ is the number of episodes. To the best of our knowledge, our algorithm is the first to ensure $mathcal{tilde{O}}(sqrt{T})$ regret in this challenging setting; in fact it achieves the same regret bound as (Rosenberg & Mansour, 2019a) that considers an easier setting with full-information feedback. Our key technical contributions are two-fold: a tighter confidence set for the transition function, and an optimistic loss estimator that is inversely weighted by an $textit{upper occupancy bound}$.
We develop the first general semi-bandit algorithm that simultaneously achieves $mathcal{O}(log T)$ regret for stochastic environments and $mathcal{O}(sqrt{T})$ regret for adversarial environments without knowledge of the regime or the number of rounds $T$. The leading problem-dependent constants of our bounds are not only optimal in some worst-case sense studied previously, but also optimal for two concrete instances of semi-bandit problems. Our algorithm and analysis extend the recent work of (Zimmert & Seldin, 2019) for the special case of multi-armed bandit, but importantly requires a novel hybrid regularizer designed specifically for semi-bandit. Experimental results on synthetic data show that our algorithm indeed performs well uniformly over different environments. We finally provide a preliminary extension of our results to the full bandit feedback.
Neural Stochastic Differential Equations model a dynamical environment with neural nets assigned to their drift and diffusion terms. The high expressive power of their nonlinearity comes at the expense of instability in the identification of the large set of free parameters. This paper presents a recipe to improve the prediction accuracy of such models in three steps: i) accounting for epistemic uncertainty by assuming probabilistic weights, ii) incorporation of partial knowledge on the state dynamics, and iii) training the resultant hybrid model by an objective derived from a PAC-Bayesian generalization bound. We observe in our experiments that this recipe effectively translates partial and noisy prior knowledge into an improved model fit.
A Markov Decision Process (MDP) is a popular model for reinforcement learning. However, its commonly used assumption of stationary dynamics and rewards is too stringent and fails to hold in adversarial, nonstationary, or multi-agent problems. We study an episodic setting where the parameters of an MDP can differ across episodes. We learn a reliable policy of this potentially adversarial MDP by developing an Adversarial Reinforcement Learning (ARL) algorithm that reduces our MDP to a sequence of emph{adversarial} bandit problems. ARL achieves $O(sqrt{SATH^3})$ regret, which is optimal with respect to $S$, $A$, and $T$, and its dependence on $H$ is the best (even for the usual stationary MDP) among existing model-free methods.
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