Bellman Unbiasedness: Toward Provably Efficient Distributional Reinforcement Learning with General Value Function Approximation

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 $\textit{Bellman unbiasedness}$ 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, $\texttt{SF-LSVI}$, 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.

@article{cho2025_2407.21260,
  title={ Bellman Unbiasedness: Toward Provably Efficient Distributional Reinforcement Learning with General Value Function Approximation },
  author={ Taehyun Cho and Seungyub Han and Seokhun Ju and Dohyeong Kim and Kyungjae Lee and Jungwoo Lee },
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2407.21260},
  year={ 2025 }
}