Multi-User Reinforcement Learning with Low Rank Rewards

Abstract: In this work, we consider the problem of collaborative multi-user reinforcement learning. In this setting there are multiple users with the same state-action space and transition probabilities but with different rewards. Under the assumption that the reward matrix of the $N$ users has a low-rank structure -- a standard and practically successful assumption in the offline collaborative filtering setting -- the question is can we design algorithms with significantly lower sample complexity compared to the ones that learn the MDP individually for each user. Our main contribution is an algorithm which explores rewards collaboratively with $N$ user-specific MDPs and can learn rewards efficiently in two key settings: tabular MDPs and linear MDPs. When $N$ is large and the rank is constant, the sample complexity per MDP depends logarithmically over the size of the state-space, which represents an exponential reduction (in the state-space size) when compared to the standard ``non-collaborative'' algorithms.