Posterior Sampling for Continuing Environments
This work addresses the challenge of scalable reinforcement learning in non-episodic settings, representing an incremental advancement with formal analysis.
The paper tackles the problem of extending posterior sampling for reinforcement learning to continuing environments, establishing a Bayesian regret bound of $ ilde{O}(τS \sqrt{A T})$ for the proposed method.
We develop an extension of posterior sampling for reinforcement learning (PSRL) that is suited for a continuing agent-environment interface and integrates naturally into agent designs that scale to complex environments. The approach, continuing PSRL, maintains a statistically plausible model of the environment and follows a policy that maximizes expected $γ$-discounted return in that model. At each time, with probability $1-γ$, the model is replaced by a sample from the posterior distribution over environments. For a choice of discount factor that suitably depends on the horizon $T$, we establish an $\tilde{O}(τS \sqrt{A T})$ bound on the Bayesian regret, where $S$ is the number of environment states, $A$ is the number of actions, and $τ$ denotes the reward averaging time, which is a bound on the duration required to accurately estimate the average reward of any policy. Our work is the first to formalize and rigorously analyze the resampling approach with randomized exploration.