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Emmeran Johnson

5 accepted papers

2025

Does Stochastic Gradient really succeed for bandits?

NeurIPS 2025oral

Recent works of Mei et al. (2023, 2024) have deepened the theoretical understanding of the *Stochastic Gradient Bandit* (SGB) policy, showing that using a constant learning rate guarantees asymptotic convergence to the optimal policy, and that sufficiently *small* learning rates can yield logarithmi…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

On the necessity of adaptive regularisation: Optimal anytime online learning on $\boldsymbol{\ell_p}$-balls

NeurIPS 2025spotlight

We study online convex optimization on $\ell_p$-balls in $\mathbb{R}^d$ for $p > 2$. While always sub-linear, the optimal regret exhibits a shift between the high-dimensional setting ($d > T$), when the dimension $d$ is greater than the time horizon $T$ and the low-dimensional setting ($d \leq T$).…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Stochastic Shortest Path with Sparse Adversarial Costs

NeurIPS 2025poster

We study the adversarial Stochastic Shortest Path (SSP) problem with sparse costs under full-information feedback. In the known transition setting, existing bounds based on Online Mirror Descent (OMD) with negative-entropy regularization scale with $\sqrt{\log S A}$, where $SA$ is the size of the st…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2024

Sample-Efficiency in Multi-Batch Reinforcement Learning: The Need for Dimension-Dependent Adaptivity

ICLR 2024poster

We theoretically explore the relationship between sample-efficiency and adaptivity in reinforcement learning. An algorithm is sample-efficient if it uses a number of queries $n$ to the environment that is polynomial in the dimension $d$ of the problem. Adaptivity refers to the frequency at which que…

Cited by 2SourcePDFScholar
2023

Optimal Convergence Rate for Exact Policy Mirror Descent in Discounted Markov Decision Processes

NeurIPS 2023poster

Policy Mirror Descent (PMD) is a general family of algorithms that covers a wide range of novel and fundamental methods in reinforcement learning. Motivated by the instability of policy iteration (PI) with inexact policy evaluation, unregularised PMD algorithmically regularises the policy improvemen…

Cited by 17SourcePDFScholar