Misspecified $Q$-Learning with Sparse Linear Function Approximation: Tight Bounds on Approximation Error

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Du, Ally Yalei, Yang, Lin F., Wang, Ruosong
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2024
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author Du, Ally Yalei
Yang, Lin F.
Wang, Ruosong
author_facet Du, Ally Yalei
Yang, Lin F.
Wang, Ruosong
contents The recent work by Dong & Yang (2023) showed for misspecified sparse linear bandits, one can obtain an $O\left(ε\right)$-optimal policy using a polynomial number of samples when the sparsity is a constant, where $ε$ is the misspecification error. This result is in sharp contrast to misspecified linear bandits without sparsity, which require an exponential number of samples to get the same guarantee. In order to study whether the analog result is possible in the reinforcement learning setting, we consider the following problem: assuming the optimal $Q$-function is a $d$-dimensional linear function with sparsity $k$ and misspecification error $ε$, whether we can obtain an $O\left(ε\right)$-optimal policy using number of samples polynomially in the feature dimension $d$. We first demonstrate why the standard approach based on Bellman backup or the existing optimistic value function elimination approach such as OLIVE (Jiang et al., 2017) achieves suboptimal guarantees for this problem. We then design a novel elimination-based algorithm to show one can obtain an $O\left(Hε\right)$-optimal policy with sample complexity polynomially in the feature dimension $d$ and planning horizon $H$. Lastly, we complement our upper bound with an $\widetildeΩ\left(Hε\right)$ suboptimality lower bound, giving a complete picture of this problem.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2407_13622
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Misspecified $Q$-Learning with Sparse Linear Function Approximation: Tight Bounds on Approximation Error
Du, Ally Yalei
Yang, Lin F.
Wang, Ruosong
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
The recent work by Dong & Yang (2023) showed for misspecified sparse linear bandits, one can obtain an $O\left(ε\right)$-optimal policy using a polynomial number of samples when the sparsity is a constant, where $ε$ is the misspecification error. This result is in sharp contrast to misspecified linear bandits without sparsity, which require an exponential number of samples to get the same guarantee. In order to study whether the analog result is possible in the reinforcement learning setting, we consider the following problem: assuming the optimal $Q$-function is a $d$-dimensional linear function with sparsity $k$ and misspecification error $ε$, whether we can obtain an $O\left(ε\right)$-optimal policy using number of samples polynomially in the feature dimension $d$. We first demonstrate why the standard approach based on Bellman backup or the existing optimistic value function elimination approach such as OLIVE (Jiang et al., 2017) achieves suboptimal guarantees for this problem. We then design a novel elimination-based algorithm to show one can obtain an $O\left(Hε\right)$-optimal policy with sample complexity polynomially in the feature dimension $d$ and planning horizon $H$. Lastly, we complement our upper bound with an $\widetildeΩ\left(Hε\right)$ suboptimality lower bound, giving a complete picture of this problem.
title Misspecified $Q$-Learning with Sparse Linear Function Approximation: Tight Bounds on Approximation Error
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.13622