Reward Biased Maximum Likelihood Estimation for Reinforcement Learning

The Reward-Biased Maximum Likelihood Estimate (RBMLE) for adaptive control of Markov chains was proposed to overcome the central obstacle of what is variously called the fundamental "closed-identifiability problem" of adaptive control, the "dual control problem", or, contemporaneously, the "exploration vs. exploitation problem". It exploited the key observation that since the maximum likelihood parameter estimator can asymptotically identify the closed-transition probabilities under a certainty equivalent approach, the limiting parameter estimates must necessarily have an optimal reward that is less than the optimal reward attainable for the true but unknown system. Hence it proposed a counteracting reverse bias in favor of parameters with larger optimal rewards, providing a solution to the fundamental problem alluded to above. It thereby proposed an optimistic approach of favoring parameters with larger optimal rewards, now known as "optimism in the face of uncertainty". The RBMLE approach has been proved to be long-term average reward optimal in a variety of contexts. However, modern attention is focused on the much finer notion of "regret", or finite-time performance. Recent analysis of RBMLE for multi-armed stochastic bandits and linear contextual bandits has shown that it not only has state-of-the-art regret, but it also exhibits empirical performance comparable to or better than the best current contenders, and leads to strikingly simple index policies. Motivated by this, we examine the finite-time performance of RBMLE for reinforcement learning tasks that involve the general problem of optimal control of unknown Markov Decision Processes. We show that it has a regret of $\mathcal{O}( \log T)$ over a time horizon of $T$ steps, similar to state-of-the-art algorithms. Simulation studies show that RBMLE outperforms other algorithms such as UCRL2 and Thompson Sampling.