Provably Efficient Reinforcement Learning for Discounted MDPs with Feature Mapping

Authors: Dongruo Zhou, Jiafan He, Quanquan Gu

ICML 2021 | Conference PDF | Archive PDF | Plain Text | LLM Run Details

Reproducibility Variable Result LLM Response
Research Type Theoretical We propose a novel algorithm which makes use of the feature mapping and obtains a e O(d T/(1 γ)2) regret, where d is the dimension of the feature space, T is the time horizon and γ is the discount factor of the MDP. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first polynomial regret bound without accessing to a generative model or making strong assumptions such as ergodicity of the MDP. By constructing a special class of MDPs, we also show that for any algorithms, the regret is lower bounded by Ω(d T/(1 γ)1.5). Our upper and lower bound results together suggest that the proposed reinforcement learning algorithm is near-optimal up to a (1 γ) 0.5 factor.
Researcher Affiliation Academia Dongruo Zhou 1 Jiafan He 1 Quanquan Gu 1 1Department of Computer Science, University of California, Los Angeles, CA 90095, USA.
Pseudocode Yes Algorithm 1 Upper-Confidence Linear Kernel Reinforcement Learning (UCLK) Algorithm 2 Extended Value Iteration: EVI(C, U)
Open Source Code No The paper does not provide concrete access to source code for the methodology described.
Open Datasets No This paper focuses on theoretical analysis of a reinforcement learning algorithm for a defined class of MDPs and does not utilize a traditional public dataset for training or evaluation.
Dataset Splits No This paper is theoretical and does not conduct experiments involving dataset splits (training, validation, test).
Hardware Specification No The paper does not describe any specific hardware used for experiments, as it is a theoretical work.
Software Dependencies No The paper does not provide specific software dependencies with version numbers, as it is a theoretical work and does not describe empirical implementations.
Experiment Setup No The paper is theoretical and does not describe any experimental setup details such as hyperparameters or training configurations.