{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/provably-efficient-exploration-for-rl-with","title":"Provably Efficient Exploration for Reinforcement Learning Using Unsupervised Learning","arxiv_id":"2003.06898","date":"2020-03-15","proceeding":"NeurIPS 2020 12","authors":["Fei Feng","Ruosong Wang","Wotao Yin","Simon S. Du","Lin F. Yang"],"abstract":"Motivated by the prevailing paradigm of using unsupervised learning for efficient exploration in reinforcement learning (RL) problems [tang2017exploration,bellemare2016unifying], we investigate when this paradigm is provably efficient. We study episodic Markov decision processes with rich observations generated from a small number of latent states. We present a general algorithmic framework that is built upon two components: an unsupervised learning algorithm and a no-regret tabular RL algorithm. Theoretically, we prove that as long as the unsupervised learning algorithm enjoys a polynomial sample complexity guarantee, we can find a near-optimal policy with sample complexity polynomial in the number of latent states, which is significantly smaller than the number of observations. Empirically, we instantiate our framework on a class of hard exploration problems to demonstrate the practicality of our theory.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.06898v4","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2003.06898v4.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"provably-efficient-exploration-for-rl-with","repo_url":"https://github.com/FlorenceFeng/StateDecoding","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"efficient-exploration","task_name":"Efficient Exploration"},{"task_slug":"reinforcement-learning","task_name":"Reinforcement Learning"},{"task_slug":"reinforcement-learning-1","task_name":"Reinforcement Learning (RL)"},{"task_slug":"reinforcement-learning-2","task_name":"reinforcement-learning"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}