Regret Bounds for Learning State Representations in Reinforcement Learning

Ronald Ortner, Matteo Pirotta, Alessandro Lazaric, Ronan Fruit, Odalric-Ambrym Maillard

Neural Information Processing Systems 

We consider the problem of online reinforcement learning when several state representations (mapping histories to a discrete state space) are available to the learning agent. At least one of these representations is assumed to induce a Markov decision process (MDP), and the performance of the agent is measured in terms of cumulative regret against the optimal policy giving the highest average reward in this MDP representation.