"Reinforcement learning is learning what to do – how to map situations to actions – so as to maximize a numerical reward signal. The learner is not told which actions to take, as in most forms of machine learning, but instead must discover which actions yield the most reward by trying them." – Sutton, Richard S. and Andrew G. Barto. Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction. (1.1). MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1998.
Inparticular,well knownbounds foronline learningscale as a function of the gap between the expected reward of a particular action and the optimalaction [ABF02] and also on the variance ofthe rewards [AMS09].