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Safety in reinforcement learning has become increasingly important in recent years. Yet, existing solutions either fail to strictly avoid choosing unsafe actions, which may lead to catastrophic results in safety-critical systems, or fail to provide regret guarantees for settings where safety constraints need to be learned. In this paper, we address both problems by first modeling safety as an unknown linear cost function of states and actions, which must always fall below a certain threshold. We then present algorithms, termed SLUCB-QVI and RSLUCB-QVI, for episodic Markov decision processes (MDPs) with linear function approximation. We show that SLUCB-QVI and RSLUCB-QVI, while with emph{no safety violation}, achieve a $tilde{mathcal{O}}left(kappasqrt{d^3H^3T}right)$ regret, nearly matching that of state-of-the-art unsafe algorithms, where $H$ is the duration of each episode, $d$ is the dimension of the feature mapping, $kappa$ is a constant characterizing the safety constraints, and $T$ is the total number of action plays. We further present numerical simulations that corroborate our theoretical findings.
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Despite many algorithmic advances, our theoretical understanding of practical distributional reinforcement learning methods remains limited. One exception is Rowland et al. (2018)s analysis of the C51 algorithm in terms of the Cramer distance, but their results only apply to the tabular setting and ignore C51s use of a softmax to produce normalized distributions. In this paper we adapt the Cramer distance to deal with arbitrary vectors. From it we derive a new distributional algorithm which is fully Cramer-based and can be combined to linear function approximation, with formal guarantees in the context of policy evaluation. In allowing the models prediction to be any real vector, we lose the probabilistic interpretation behind the method, but otherwise maintain the appealing properties of distributional approaches. To the best of our knowledge, ours is the first proof of convergence of a distributional algorithm combined with function approximation. Perhaps surprisingly, our results provide evidence that Cramer-based distributional methods may perform worse than directly approximating the value function.
Reinforcement learning (RL) with linear function approximation has received increasing attention recently. However, existing work has focused on obtaining $sqrt{T}$-type regret bound, where $T$ is the number of interactions with the MDP. In this paper, we show that logarithmic regret is attainable under two recently proposed linear MDP assumptions provided that there exists a positive sub-optimality gap for the optimal action-value function. More specifically, under the linear MDP assumption (Jin et al. 2019), the LSVI-UCB algorithm can achieve $tilde{O}(d^{3}H^5/text{gap}_{text{min}}cdot log(T))$ regret; and under the linear mixture MDP assumption (Ayoub et al. 2020), the UCRL-VTR algorithm can achieve $tilde{O}(d^{2}H^5/text{gap}_{text{min}}cdot log^3(T))$ regret, where $d$ is the dimension of feature mapping, $H$ is the length of episode, $text{gap}_{text{min}}$ is the minimal sub-optimality gap, and $tilde O$ hides all logarithmic terms except $log(T)$. To the best of our knowledge, these are the first logarithmic regret bounds for RL with linear function approximation. We also establish gap-dependent lower bounds for the two linear MDP models.
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 early theoretical results on linear Markov decision processes provide regret bounds that scale with the dimension of the linear approximation. Ideally, we would like to automatically identify the minimal dimension of the approximation that is sufficient to encode an optimal policy. Towards this end, we consider the problem of model selection in RL with function approximation, given a set of candidate RL algorithms with known regret guarantees. The learners goal is to adapt to the complexity of the optimal algorithm without knowing it textit{a priori}. We present a meta-algorithm that successively rejects increasingly complex models using a simple statistical test. Given at least one candidate that satisfies realizability, we prove the meta-algorithm adapts to the optimal complexity with $tilde{O}(L^{5/6} T^{2/3})$ regret compared to the optimal candidates $tilde{O}(sqrt T)$ regret, where $T$ is the number of episodes and $L$ is the number of algorithms. The dimension and horizon dependencies remain optimal with respect to the best candidate, and our meta-algorithmic approach is flexible to incorporate multiple candidate algorithms and models. Finally, we show that the meta-algorithm automatically admits significantly improved instance-dependent regret bounds that depend on the gaps between the maximal values attainable by the candidates.
We propose a model-free reinforcement learning algorithm inspired by the popular randomized least squares value iteration (RLSVI) algorithm as well as the optimism principle. Unlike existing upper-confidence-bound (UCB) based approaches, which are often computationally intractable, our algorithm drives exploration by simply perturbing the training data with judiciously chosen i.i.d. scalar noises. To attain optimistic value function estimation without resorting to a UCB-style bonus, we introduce an optimistic reward sampling procedure. When the value functions can be represented by a function class $mathcal{F}$, our algorithm achieves a worst-case regret bound of $widetilde{O}(mathrm{poly}(d_EH)sqrt{T})$ where $T$ is the time elapsed, $H$ is the planning horizon and $d_E$ is the $textit{eluder dimension}$ of $mathcal{F}$. In the linear setting, our algorithm reduces to LSVI-PHE, a variant of RLSVI, that enjoys an $widetilde{mathcal{O}}(sqrt{d^3H^3T})$ regret. We complement the theory with an empirical evaluation across known difficult exploration tasks.
We study reinforcement learning (RL) with linear function approximation. Existing algorithms for this problem only have high-probability regret and/or Probably Approximately Correct (PAC) sample complexity guarantees, which cannot guarantee the convergence to the optimal policy. In this paper, in order to overcome the limitation of existing algorithms, we propose a new algorithm called FLUTE, which enjoys uniform-PAC convergence to the optimal policy with high probability. The uniform-PAC guarantee is the strongest possible guarantee for reinforcement learning in the literature, which can directly imply both PAC and high probability regret bounds, making our algorithm superior to all existing algorithms with linear function approximation. At the core of our algorithm is a novel minimax value function estimator and a multi-level partition scheme to select the training samples from historical observations. Both of these techniques are new and of independent interest.
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