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Auteurs principaux: Ma, Jianfei, Lee, Wee Sun
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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Accès en ligne:https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.15405
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author Ma, Jianfei
Lee, Wee Sun
author_facet Ma, Jianfei
Lee, Wee Sun
contents At the boundary between the known and the unknown, an agent inevitably confronts the dilemma of whether to explore or to exploit. Epistemic uncertainty reflects such boundaries, representing systematic uncertainty due to limited knowledge. In this paper, we propose a Bayesian reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm, $\texttt{EUBRL}$, which leverages epistemic guidance to achieve principled exploration. This guidance adaptively reduces per-step regret arising from estimation errors. We establish nearly minimax-optimal regret and sample complexity guarantees for a class of sufficiently expressive priors in infinite-horizon discounted MDPs. Empirically, we evaluate $\texttt{EUBRL}$ on tasks characterized by sparse rewards, long horizons, and stochasticity. Results demonstrate that $\texttt{EUBRL}$ achieves superior sample efficiency, scalability, and consistency.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_15405
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle EUBRL: Epistemic Uncertainty Directed Bayesian Reinforcement Learning
Ma, Jianfei
Lee, Wee Sun
Machine Learning
At the boundary between the known and the unknown, an agent inevitably confronts the dilemma of whether to explore or to exploit. Epistemic uncertainty reflects such boundaries, representing systematic uncertainty due to limited knowledge. In this paper, we propose a Bayesian reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm, $\texttt{EUBRL}$, which leverages epistemic guidance to achieve principled exploration. This guidance adaptively reduces per-step regret arising from estimation errors. We establish nearly minimax-optimal regret and sample complexity guarantees for a class of sufficiently expressive priors in infinite-horizon discounted MDPs. Empirically, we evaluate $\texttt{EUBRL}$ on tasks characterized by sparse rewards, long horizons, and stochasticity. Results demonstrate that $\texttt{EUBRL}$ achieves superior sample efficiency, scalability, and consistency.
title EUBRL: Epistemic Uncertainty Directed Bayesian Reinforcement Learning
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.15405