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We study reinforcement learning for two-player zero-sum Markov games with simultaneous moves in the finite-horizon setting, where the transition kernel of the underlying Markov games can be parameterized by a linear function over the current state, both players actions and the next state. In particular, we assume that we can control both players and aim to find the Nash Equilibrium by minimizing the duality gap. We propose an algorithm Nash-UCRL-VTR based on the principle Optimism-in-Face-of-Uncertainty. Our algorithm only needs to find a Coarse Correlated Equilibrium (CCE), which is computationally very efficient. Specifically, we show that Nash-UCRL-VTR can provably achieve an $tilde{O}(dHsqrt{T})$ regret, where $d$ is the linear function dimension, $H$ is the length of the game and $T$ is the total number of steps in the game. To access the optimality of our algorithm, we also prove an $tilde{Omega}( dHsqrt{T})$ lower bound on the regret. Our upper bound matches the lower bound up to logarithmic factors, which suggests the optimality of our algorithm.
We study the reinforcement learning for finite-horizon episodic Markov decision processes with adversarial reward and full information feedback, where the unknown transition probability function is a linear function of a given feature mapping. We propose an optimistic policy optimization algorithm with Bernstein bonus and show that it can achieve $tilde{O}(dHsqrt{T})$ regret, where $H$ is the length of the episode, $T$ is the number of interaction with the MDP and $d$ is the dimension of the feature mapping. Furthermore, we also prove a matching lower bound of $tilde{Omega}(dHsqrt{T})$ up to logarithmic factors. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first computationally efficient, nearly minimax optimal algorithm for adversarial Markov decision processes with linear function approximation.
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 mapping of the current state, action, and next state. We propose a new algorithm UCRL2-VTR, which can be seen as an extension of the UCRL2 algorithm with linear function approximation. We show that UCRL2-VTR with Bernstein-type bonus can achieve a regret of $tilde{O}(dsqrt{DT})$, where $d$ is the dimension of the feature mapping, $T$ is the horizon, and $sqrt{D}$ is the diameter of the MDP. We also prove a matching lower bound $tilde{Omega}(dsqrt{DT})$, which suggests that the proposed UCRL2-VTR is minimax optimal up to logarithmic factors. To the best of our knowledge, our algorithm is the first nearly minimax optimal RL algorithm with function approximation in the infinite-horizon average-reward setting.
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.
We study query and computationally efficient planning algorithms with linear function approximation and a simulator. We assume that the agent only has local access to the simulator, meaning that the agent can only query the simulator at states that have been visited before. This setting is more practical than many prior works on reinforcement learning with a generative model. We propose an algorithm named confident Monte Carlo least square policy iteration (Confident MC-LSPI) for this setting. Under the assumption that the Q-functions of all deterministic policies are linear in known features of the state-action pairs, we show that our algorithm has polynomial query and computational complexities in the dimension of the features, the effective planning horizon and the targeted sub-optimality, while these complexities are independent of the size of the state space. One technical contribution of our work is the introduction of a novel proof technique that makes use of a virtual policy iteration algorithm. We use this method to leverage existing results on $ell_infty$-bounded approximate policy iteration to show that our algorithm can learn the optimal policy for the given initial state even only with local access to the simulator. We believe that this technique can be extended to broader settings beyond this work.
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.