Provably Efficient Reinforcement Learning for Adversarial Restless Multi-Armed Bandits with Unknown Transitions and Bandit Feedback

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Xiong, Guojun, Li, Jian
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2024
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author Xiong, Guojun
Li, Jian
author_facet Xiong, Guojun
Li, Jian
contents Restless multi-armed bandits (RMAB) play a central role in modeling sequential decision making problems under an instantaneous activation constraint that at most B arms can be activated at any decision epoch. Each restless arm is endowed with a state that evolves independently according to a Markov decision process regardless of being activated or not. In this paper, we consider the task of learning in episodic RMAB with unknown transition functions and adversarial rewards, which can change arbitrarily across episodes. Further, we consider a challenging but natural bandit feedback setting that only adversarial rewards of activated arms are revealed to the decision maker (DM). The goal of the DM is to maximize its total adversarial rewards during the learning process while the instantaneous activation constraint must be satisfied in each decision epoch. We develop a novel reinforcement learning algorithm with two key contributors: a novel biased adversarial reward estimator to deal with bandit feedback and unknown transitions, and a low-complexity index policy to satisfy the instantaneous activation constraint. We show $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(H\sqrt{T})$ regret bound for our algorithm, where $T$ is the number of episodes and $H$ is the episode length. To our best knowledge, this is the first algorithm to ensure $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(\sqrt{T})$ regret for adversarial RMAB in our considered challenging settings.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2405_00950
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Provably Efficient Reinforcement Learning for Adversarial Restless Multi-Armed Bandits with Unknown Transitions and Bandit Feedback
Xiong, Guojun
Li, Jian
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Restless multi-armed bandits (RMAB) play a central role in modeling sequential decision making problems under an instantaneous activation constraint that at most B arms can be activated at any decision epoch. Each restless arm is endowed with a state that evolves independently according to a Markov decision process regardless of being activated or not. In this paper, we consider the task of learning in episodic RMAB with unknown transition functions and adversarial rewards, which can change arbitrarily across episodes. Further, we consider a challenging but natural bandit feedback setting that only adversarial rewards of activated arms are revealed to the decision maker (DM). The goal of the DM is to maximize its total adversarial rewards during the learning process while the instantaneous activation constraint must be satisfied in each decision epoch. We develop a novel reinforcement learning algorithm with two key contributors: a novel biased adversarial reward estimator to deal with bandit feedback and unknown transitions, and a low-complexity index policy to satisfy the instantaneous activation constraint. We show $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(H\sqrt{T})$ regret bound for our algorithm, where $T$ is the number of episodes and $H$ is the episode length. To our best knowledge, this is the first algorithm to ensure $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(\sqrt{T})$ regret for adversarial RMAB in our considered challenging settings.
title Provably Efficient Reinforcement Learning for Adversarial Restless Multi-Armed Bandits with Unknown Transitions and Bandit Feedback
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.00950