From Dirichlet to Rubin: Optimistic Exploration in RL without Bonuses
Daniil Tiapkin, Denis Belomestny, Eric Moulines, Alexey Naumov, Sergey Samsonov, Yunhao Tang, Michal Valko, Pierre Menard
Abstract
We propose the Bayes-UCBVI algorithm for reinforcement learning in tabular, stage-dependent, episodic Markov decision process: a natural extension of the Bayes-UCB algorithm by Kaufmann et al. 2012 for multi-armed bandits. Our method uses the quantile of a Q-value function posterior as upper confidence bound on the optimal Q-value function. For Bayes-UCBVI, we prove a regret bound of order $\widetilde{\mathcal{O}}(\sqrt{H^3SAT})$ where $H$ is the length of one episode, $S$ is the number of states, $A$ the number of actions, $T$ the number of episodes, that matches the lower-bound of $\Omega(\sqrt{H^3SAT})$ up to poly-$\log$ terms in $H,S,A,T$ for a large enough $T$. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first algorithm that obtains an optimal dependence on the horizon $H$ (and $S$)
BibTeX
@InProceedings{pmlr-v162-tiapkin22a,
title = {From {D}irichlet to Rubin: Optimistic Exploration in {RL} without Bonuses},
author = {Tiapkin, Daniil and Belomestny, Denis and Moulines, Eric and Naumov, Alexey and Samsonov, Sergey and Tang, Yunhao and Valko, Michal and Menard, Pierre},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 39th International Conference on Machine Learning},
pages = {21380--21431},
year = {2022},
editor = {Chaudhuri, Kamalika and Jegelka, Stefanie and Song, Le and Szepesvari, Csaba and Niu, Gang and Sabato, Sivan},
volume = {162},
series = {Proceedings of Machine Learning Research},
month = {17--23 Jul},
publisher = {PMLR},
pdf = {https://proceedings.mlr.press/v162/tiapkin22a/tiapkin22a.pdf},
url = {https://proceedings.mlr.press/v162/tiapkin22a.html},
abstract = {We propose the Bayes-UCBVI algorithm for reinforcement learning in tabular, stage-dependent, episodic Markov decision process: a natural extension of the Bayes-UCB algorithm by Kaufmann et al. 2012 for multi-armed bandits. Our method uses the quantile of a Q-value function posterior as upper confidence bound on the optimal Q-value function. For Bayes-UCBVI, we prove a regret bound of order $\widetilde{\mathcal{O}}(\sqrt{H^3SAT})$ where $H$ is the length of one episode, $S$ is the number of states, $A$ the number of actions, $T$ the number of episodes, that matches the lower-bound of $\Omega(\sqrt{H^3SAT})$ up to poly-$\log$ terms in $H,S,A,T$ for a large enough $T$. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first algorithm that obtains an optimal dependence on the horizon $H$ (and $S$)