VLDB 2026 Research / reviewers in the wild / expert
Shulun Chen
dblp:409/8817
· DBLP profile ↗
1ranked-venue papers
1as first author
1since 2021 · last 2025
—ORCID · none
Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several
Artificial intelligence and machine learning · 1 · 1 first-author · 1 since 2021
Expertise — from the expertise taxonomy: the topics of the expert's papers under the CCF categories. A weight counts papers with recency: 1 for a paper about the topic, 0.3 when the topic is its context, halved every five years.
| Artificial intelligence
1 paper |
Reinforcement learning · 75% Learning theory · 25% |
Topics — the 4 heaviest of 5, each with the papers that count most for it
| Topic | Weight | Papers | Last | Evidence papers |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Machine learning › Reinforcement learning › regret minimization
gap-dependent regret |
0.9 | 1 | 2025 | Sharp Gap-Dependent Variance-Aware Regret Bounds for Tabular MDPs · NeurIPS 2025 |
Machine learning › Reinforcement learning
markov decision process |
0.9 | 1 | 2025 | Sharp Gap-Dependent Variance-Aware Regret Bounds for Tabular MDPs · NeurIPS 2025 |
Machine learning › Learning theory › online learning
regret bounds |
0.9 | 1 | 2025 | Sharp Gap-Dependent Variance-Aware Regret Bounds for Tabular MDPs · NeurIPS 2025 |
Machine learning › Reinforcement learning › markov decision process › finite markov decision processes
tabular MDP |
0.9 | 1 | 2025 | Sharp Gap-Dependent Variance-Aware Regret Bounds for Tabular MDPs · NeurIPS 2025 |
Methods — techniques the papers use, named apart from their topics
monotonic value propagation · 0.9lower bound analysis · 0.9
| Year | Publication | Venue | Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2025 | Sharp Gap-Dependent Variance-Aware Regret Bounds for Tabular MDPsabstractWe consider gap-dependent regret bounds for episodic MDPs.
We show that the Monotonic Value Propagation (MVP) algorithm (Zhang et al. [2024]) achieves a variance-aware gap-dependent regret bound of
$$\tilde{O}\left(\left(\sum_{\Delta_h(s,a)>0} \frac{H^2 \log K \land \mathtt{Var}\_{\max}^{\textup{c}}}{\Delta_h(s,a)} +\sum_{\Delta_h(s,a)=0}\frac{ H^2 \land \mathtt{Var}\_{\max}^{\textup{c}}}{\Delta_{\mathrm{min}}} + SAH^4 (S \lor H) \right) \log K\right),$$
where $H$ is the planning horizon, $S$ is the number of states, $A$ is the number of actions, $K$ is the number of episodes, and $\tilde{O}$ hides $\mathsf{poly} \log (S, A, H, 1 / \Delta\_{\mathrm{min}}, 1 / \delta)$ terms. Here, $\Delta_h(s,a) =V_h^* (a) - Q_h^* (s, a)$ represents the suboptimality gap and $\Delta_{\mathrm{min}} := \min_{\Delta_h (s,a) > 0} \Delta_h(s,a)$.
The term $\mathtt{Var}\_{\max}^{\textup{c}}$ denotes the maximum conditional total variance, calculated as the maximum over all $(\pi, h, s)$ tuples of the expected total variance under policy $\pi$ conditioned on trajectories visiting state $s$ at step $h$.
$\mathtt{Var}\_{\max}^{\textup{c}}$ characterizes the maximum randomness encountered when learning any $(h, s)$ pair.
Our result stems from a novel analysis of the weighted sum of the suboptimality gap and can be potentially adapted for other algorithms.
To complement the study, we establish a lower bound of
$$\Omega \left( \sum_{\Delta_h(s,a)>0} \frac{H^2 \land \mathtt{Var}\_{\max}^{\textup{c}}}{\Delta_h(s,a)}\cdot \log K\right),$$
demonstrating the necessity of dependence on $\mathtt{Var}\_{\max}^{\textup{c}}$ even when the maximum unconditional total variance (without conditioning on $(h, s)$) approaches zero. Shulun Chen, Runlong Zhou, Maryam Fazel, Simon S. Du |
NeurIPS | 1 |