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#1 Bellman Unbiasedness: Toward Provably Efficient Distributional Reinforcement Learning with General Value Function Approximation [PDF] [Copy] [Kimi] [REL]

Authors: Taehyun Cho, Seungyub Han, Seokhun Ju, Dohyeong Kim, Kyungjae Lee, Jungwoo Lee

Distributional reinforcement learning improves performance by capturing environmental stochasticity, but a comprehensive theoretical understanding of its effectiveness remains elusive.In addition, the intractable element of the infinite dimensionality of distributions has been overlooked.In this paper, we present a regret analysis of distributional reinforcement learning with general value function approximation in a finite episodic Markov decision process setting. We first introduce a key notion of Bellman unbiasedness which is essential for exactly learnable and provably efficient distributional updates in an online manner.Among all types of statistical functionals for representing infinite-dimensional return distributions, our theoretical results demonstrate that only moment functionals can exactly capture the statistical information.Secondly, we propose a provably efficient algorithm, SF-LSVI, that achieves a tight regret bound of $\tilde{O}(d_E H^{\frac{3}{2}}\sqrt{K})$ where $H$ is the horizon, $K$ is the number of episodes, and $d_E$ is the eluder dimension of a function class.

Subject: ICML.2025 - Poster