Related papers: f-Divergence constrained policy improvement
A key task in managing distributed, sensitive data is to measure the extent to which a distribution changes. Understanding this drift can effectively support a variety of federated learning and analytics tasks. However, in many practical…
This paper considers reparameterization invariant Bayesian point estimates and credible regions of model parameters for scientific inference and communication. The effect of intrinsic loss function choice in Bayesian intrinsic estimates and…
Federated Learning (FL) is a distributed learning approach that trains machine learning models across multiple devices while keeping their local data private. However, FL often faces challenges due to data heterogeneity, leading to…
Standard trust-region methods constrain policy updates via Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence. However, KL controls only an average divergence and does not directly prevent rare, large likelihood-ratio excursions that destabilize…
While reinforcement learning (RL) promises to revolutionize the control of complex nonlinear robotic systems, a profound gap persists between the heuristic success of model-free off-policy deep RL and the underlying theory, which remains…
Aligning language models with preferences can be posed as approximating a target distribution representing some desired behavior. Existing approaches differ both in the functional form of the target distribution and the algorithm used to…
Recently, continual learning has received a lot of attention. One of the significant problems is the occurrence of \emph{concept drift}, which consists of changing probabilistic characteristics of the incoming data. In the case of the…
We study the estimation of risk-sensitive policies in reinforcement learning problems defined by a Markov Decision Process (MDPs) whose state and action spaces are countably finite. Prior efforts are predominately afflicted by computational…
In this paper, we investigate the convergence of language models (LMs) trained under different random seeds, measuring convergence as the expected per-token Kullback--Leibler (KL) divergence across seeds. By comparing LM convergence as a…
Large language models (LLMs) have been widely used for problem-solving tasks. Most recent work improves their performance through supervised fine-tuning (SFT) with labeled data or reinforcement learning (RL) from task feedback. In this…
Policy alignment of large language models refers to constrained policy optimization, where the policy is optimized to maximize a reward while staying close to a reference policy with respect to an $f$-divergence such as the $\mathsf{KL}$…
Complex, high-dimensional data is ubiquitous across many scientific disciplines, including machine learning, biology, and the social sciences. One of the primary methods of visualizing these datasets is with two-dimensional scatter plots…
Kalman filtering is a widely used framework for Bayesian estimation. The partitioned update Kalman filter applies a Kalman filter update in parts so that the most linear parts of measurements are applied first. In this paper, we generalize…
We show that the Kullback-Leibler distance is a good measure of the statistical uncertainty of correlation matrices estimated by using a finite set of data. For correlation matrices of multivariate Gaussian variables we analytically…
We study the gradient flow for a relaxed approximation to the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence between a moving source and a fixed target distribution. This approximation, termed the KALE (KL approximate lower-bound estimator), solves a…
Knowing if a model will generalize to data 'in the wild' is crucial for safe deployment. To this end, we study model disagreement notions that consider the full predictive distribution - specifically disagreement based on Hellinger…
In GFlowNets and variational inference, it has been shown that the mean square error between target and model log probabilities is an effective, low variance, surrogate loss for training generative models. This loss has the property that…
This paper presents new deviation inequalities that are valid uniformly in time under adaptive sampling in a multi-armed bandit model. The deviations are measured using the Kullback-Leibler divergence in a given one-dimensional exponential…
Compared to on-policy counterparts, off-policy model-free deep reinforcement learning can improve data efficiency by repeatedly using the previously gathered data. However, off-policy learning becomes challenging when the discrepancy…
We consider off-policy temporal-difference (TD) learning methods for policy evaluation in Markov decision processes with finite spaces and discounted reward criteria, and we present a collection of convergence results for several…