Research map / Reinforcement learning / MDPs and planning
The Regret of Exploration and the Control of Bad Episodes in Reinforcement Learning
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Measured effects reported in the paper
| What was changed | Where | Measured | Effect |
|---|---|---|---|
| add performance test (PT) to end episodes when current policy's optimistic value falls below optimistic optimum by sqrt(alpha log t / t) | UCRL2-PT · DMDP non-degenerate, Bernoulli rewards | regret of exploration | Helped |
| add performance test (PT) to end episodes | UCRL2, UCRL2B, KL-UCRL · RiverSwim and random MDP | regret | No clear effect |
| use sparse PT testing and memorisation to accelerate PT variants (ablation) | UCRL2 with PT · 5-state RiverSwim | iterations per second: from 1.0k (pure PT) to 82k (PT+M+S) | Helped |
| set alpha large (slow decay of bonus threshold) (ablation) | UCRL2-PT · RiverSwim | frequency of PT triggering | Hurt |
| set alpha to zero (always optimistic policy, UCB-like) (ablation) | UCRL2-PT · theory | regret | Hurt |
Closest papers by meaning
- Beyond Optimism: Exploration With Partially Observable Rewards (NeurIPS 2024 · similarity 0.90)
- Tighter Problem-Dependent Regret Bounds in Reinforcement Learning without Domain Knowledge using Value Function Bounds (ICML 2019 · similarity 0.90)
- Minimax Optimal Reinforcement Learning with Quasi-Optimism (ICLR 2025 · similarity 0.89)
- Position: Constants are Critical in Regret Bounds for Reinforcement Learning (ICML 2025 · similarity 0.89)
- NeoRL: Efficient Exploration for Nonepisodic RL (NeurIPS 2024 · similarity 0.89)
- Minimax Optimal Regret Bound for Reinforcement Learning with Trajectory Feedback (ICML 2025 · similarity 0.89)
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