arXiv:2510.06647v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study fine-grained gap-dependent regret bounds for model-free reinforcement learning in episodic tabular Markov Decision Processes. Existing model-free algorithms achieve minimax worst-case regret, but their gap-dependent bounds remain coarse and fail to fully capture the structure of suboptimality gaps. We address this limitation by establishing fine-grained gap-dependent regret bounds for both UCB-based and non-UCB-based algorithms. In the UCB-based setting, we develop a novel analytical framework that explicitly separates the anal
Source: arXiv cs.LG — read the full report at the original publisher.