Sample Complexity of Episodic Fixed-Horizon Reinforcement Learning

Abstract

Recently, there has been significant progress in understanding reinforcement learning in discounted infinite-horizon Markov decision processes (MDPs) by deriving tight sample complexity bounds. However, in many real-world applications, an interactive learning agent operates for a fixed or bounded period of time, for example tutoring students for exams or handling customer service requests. Such scenarios can often be better treated as episodic fixed-horizon MDPs, for which only looser bounds on the sample complexity exist. A natural notion of sample complexity in this setting is the number of episodes required to guarantee a certain performance with high probability (PAC guarantee). In this paper, we derive an upper PAC bound O(| S|^2 | A| H^2^2 1 ) and a lower PAC bound (| S| | A| H^2^2 1 + c) that match up to log-terms and an additional linear dependency on the number of states | S|. The lower bound is the first of its kind for this setting. Our upper bound leverages Bernstein's inequality to improve on previous bounds for episodic finite-horizon MDPs which have a time-horizon dependency of at least H^3.

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