Related papers: Stabilizing Q Learning Via Soft Mellowmax Operator
Q-learning with value function approximation may have the poor performance because of overestimation bias and imprecise estimate. Specifically, overestimation bias is from the maximum operator over noise estimate, which is exaggerated using…
The maximum element of the vector output by the Softmax function approaches zero as the input vector size increases. Transformer-based language models rely on Softmax to compute attention scores, causing the attention distribution to…
Softmax function is widely used in artificial neural networks for multiclass classification, multilabel classification, attention mechanisms, etc. However, its efficacy is often questioned in literature. The log-softmax loss has been shown…
Offline Reinforcement Learning (RL) struggles with distributional shifts, leading to the $Q$-value overestimation for out-of-distribution (OOD) actions. Existing methods address this issue by imposing constraints; however, they often become…
The softmax content-based attention mechanism has proven to be very beneficial in many applications of recurrent neural networks. Nevertheless it suffers from two major computational limitations. First, its computations for an attention…
This paper proposes a new regularization technique for reinforcement learning (RL) towards making policy and value functions smooth and stable. RL is known for the instability of the learning process and the sensitivity of the acquired…
We consider the problem of global optimization of an unknown non-convex smooth function with zeroth-order feedback. In this setup, an algorithm is allowed to adaptively query the underlying function at different locations and receives noisy…
Large language models (LLMs) have made transformed changes for human society. One of the key computation in LLMs is the softmax unit. This operation is important in LLMs because it allows the model to generate a distribution over possible…
In deep reinforcement learning, estimating the value function to evaluate the quality of states and actions is essential. The value function is often trained using the least squares method, which implicitly assumes a Gaussian error…
Large language models rely on attention mechanisms with a softmax activation. Yet the dominance of softmax over alternatives (e.g., component-wise or linear) remains poorly understood, and many theoretical works have focused on the…
The linear programming (LP) approach has a long history in the theory of approximate dynamic programming. When it comes to computation, however, the LP approach often suffers from poor scalability. In this work, we introduce a relaxed…
This paper addresses the problem of learning optimal policies for satisfying signal temporal logic (STL) specifications by agents with unknown stochastic dynamics. The system is modeled as a Markov decision process, in which the states…
Convergence of Q-learning has been the subject of extensive study for decades. Among the available techniques, the ordinary differential equation (ODE) method is particularly appealing as a general-purpose, off-the-shelf tool for…
Bimodal, stochastic environments present a challenge to typical Reinforcement Learning problems. This problem is one that is surprisingly common in real world applications, being particularly applicable to pricing problems. In this paper we…
An agent's ability to leverage past experience is critical for efficiently solving new tasks. Prior work has focused on using value function estimates to obtain zero-shot approximations for solutions to a new task. In soft Q-learning, we…
In recent years, the softmax model and its fast approximations have become the de-facto loss functions for deep neural networks when dealing with multi-class prediction. This loss has been extended to language modeling and recommendation,…
Stochastic approximation (SA) that involves multiple coupled sequences, known as multiple-sequence SA (MSSA), finds diverse applications in the fields of signal processing and machine learning. However, existing theoretical understandings…
Simulation-to-decision learning enables safe policy training in digital environments without risking real-world deployment, and has become essential in mission-critical domains such as supply chains and industrial systems. However,…
Double Q-learning is a classical method for reducing overestimation bias, which is caused by taking maximum estimated values in the Bellman operation. Its variants in the deep Q-learning paradigm have shown great promise in producing…
In offline reinforcement learning (RL) we have no opportunity to explore so we must make assumptions that the data is sufficient to guide picking a good policy, taking the form of assuming some coverage, realizability, Bellman completeness,…