Provably Efficient Reinforcement Learning with Multinomial Logit Function Approximation

Fuente: arXiv
Salvato in:
Dettagli Bibliografici
Autori principali: Li, Long-Fei, Zhang, Yu-Jie, Zhao, Peng, Zhou, Zhi-Hua
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2024
Soggetti:
Accesso online:
Tags: Aggiungi Tag
Nessun Tag, puoi essere il primo ad aggiungerne!!
_version_ 1866909457331519488
author Li, Long-Fei
Zhang, Yu-Jie
Zhao, Peng
Zhou, Zhi-Hua
author_facet Li, Long-Fei
Zhang, Yu-Jie
Zhao, Peng
Zhou, Zhi-Hua
contents We study a new class of MDPs that employs multinomial logit (MNL) function approximation to ensure valid probability distributions over the state space. Despite its significant benefits, incorporating the non-linear function raises substantial challenges in both statistical and computational efficiency. The best-known result of Hwang and Oh [2023] has achieved an $\widetilde{\mathcal{O}}(κ^{-1}dH^2\sqrt{K})$ regret upper bound, where $κ$ is a problem-dependent quantity, $d$ is the feature dimension, $H$ is the episode length, and $K$ is the number of episodes. However, we observe that $κ^{-1}$ exhibits polynomial dependence on the number of reachable states, which can be as large as the state space size in the worst case and thus undermines the motivation for function approximation. Additionally, their method requires storing all historical data and the time complexity scales linearly with the episode count, which is computationally expensive. In this work, we propose a statistically efficient algorithm that achieves a regret of $\widetilde{\mathcal{O}}(dH^2\sqrt{K} + κ^{-1}d^2H^2)$, eliminating the dependence on $κ^{-1}$ in the dominant term for the first time. We then address the computational challenges by introducing an enhanced algorithm that achieves the same regret guarantee but with only constant cost. Finally, we establish the first lower bound for this problem, justifying the optimality of our results in $d$ and $K$.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2405_17061
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Provably Efficient Reinforcement Learning with Multinomial Logit Function Approximation
Li, Long-Fei
Zhang, Yu-Jie
Zhao, Peng
Zhou, Zhi-Hua
Machine Learning
We study a new class of MDPs that employs multinomial logit (MNL) function approximation to ensure valid probability distributions over the state space. Despite its significant benefits, incorporating the non-linear function raises substantial challenges in both statistical and computational efficiency. The best-known result of Hwang and Oh [2023] has achieved an $\widetilde{\mathcal{O}}(κ^{-1}dH^2\sqrt{K})$ regret upper bound, where $κ$ is a problem-dependent quantity, $d$ is the feature dimension, $H$ is the episode length, and $K$ is the number of episodes. However, we observe that $κ^{-1}$ exhibits polynomial dependence on the number of reachable states, which can be as large as the state space size in the worst case and thus undermines the motivation for function approximation. Additionally, their method requires storing all historical data and the time complexity scales linearly with the episode count, which is computationally expensive. In this work, we propose a statistically efficient algorithm that achieves a regret of $\widetilde{\mathcal{O}}(dH^2\sqrt{K} + κ^{-1}d^2H^2)$, eliminating the dependence on $κ^{-1}$ in the dominant term for the first time. We then address the computational challenges by introducing an enhanced algorithm that achieves the same regret guarantee but with only constant cost. Finally, we establish the first lower bound for this problem, justifying the optimality of our results in $d$ and $K$.
title Provably Efficient Reinforcement Learning with Multinomial Logit Function Approximation
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.17061