Abstract
This paper establishes that optimistic algorithms attain gap-dependent and nonasymptotic logarithmic regret for episodic MDPs. In contrast to prior work, our bounds do not suffer a dependence on diameter-like quantities or ergodicity, and?smoothly interpolate between the gap dependent logarithmic-regret, and the -minimax rate. The key technique in our analysis is a novel “clipped” regret decomposition which applies to a broad family of recent optimistic algorithms for episodic MDPs.