Offline or batch reinforcement learning seeks to learn a near-optimal policy using history data without active exploration of the environment. To counter the insufficient coverage and sample scarcity of many offline datasets, the principle of pessimism has been recently introduced to mitigate high bias of the estimated values. While pessimistic variants of model-based algorithms (e.g., value iteration with lower confidence bounds) have been theoretically investigated, their model-free counterparts — which do not require explicit model estimation — have not been adequately studied, especially in terms of sample efficiency. To address this inadequacy, we study a pessimistic variant of Q-learning in the context of finite-horizon Markov decision processes, and characterize its sample complexity under the single-policy concentrability assumption which does not require the full coverage of the state-action space. In addition, a variance-reduced pessimistic Q-learning algorithm is proposed to achieve near-optimal sample complexity. Altogether, this work highlights the efficiency of model-free algorithms in offline RL when used in conjunction with pessimism and variance reduction.
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Uncertainty Quantification and Exploration for Reinforcement Learning
We investigate statistical uncertainty quantification for reinforcement learning (RL) and its implications in exploration policy. Despite ever-growing literature on RL applications, fundamental questions about inference and error quantification, such as large-sample behaviors, appear to remain quite open. In this paper, we fill in the literature gap by studying the central limit theorem behaviors of estimated Q-values and value functions under various RL settings. In particular, we explicitly identify closed-form expressions of the asymptotic variances, which allow us to efficiently construct asymptotically valid confidence regions for key RL quantities. Furthermore, we utilize these asymptotic expressions to design an effective exploration strategy, which we call Q-value-based Optimal Computing Budget Allocation (Q-OCBA). The policy relies on maximizing the relative discrepancies among the Q-value estimates. Numerical experiments show superior performances of our exploration strategy than other benchmark policies. Funding: This work was supported by the National Science Foundation (1720433).
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- Award ID(s):
- 1720433
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10401412
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Operations Research
- ISSN:
- 0030-364X
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1287/opre.2023.2436
