Related papers: Addressing Maximization Bias in Reinforcement Lear…
By integrating dynamics models into model-free reinforcement learning (RL) methods, model-based value expansion (MVE) algorithms have shown a significant advantage in sample efficiency as well as value estimation. However, these methods…
How to efficiently explore in reinforcement learning is an open problem. Many exploration algorithms employ the epistemic uncertainty of their own value predictions -- for instance to compute an exploration bonus or upper confidence bound.…
Quality Estimation (QE) aims to assess the quality of machine translation (MT) outputs without relying on reference translations, making it essential for real-world, large-scale MT evaluation. Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown…
Learning high-quality $Q$-value functions plays a key role in the success of many modern off-policy deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms. Previous works primarily focus on addressing the value overestimation issue, an outcome of…
We consider distributed statistical optimization in one-shot setting, where there are $m$ machines each observing $n$ i.i.d. samples. Based on its observed samples, each machine sends a $B$-bit-long message to a server. The server then…
Modern computational models in supervised machine learning are often highly parameterized universal approximators. As such, the value of the parameters is unimportant, and only the out of sample performance is considered. On the other hand…
Multi-task learning (MTL) considers learning a joint model for multiple tasks by optimizing a convex combination of all task losses. To solve the optimization problem, existing methods use an adaptive weight updating scheme, where task…
The Gauss Markov theorem states that the weighted least squares estimator is a linear minimum variance unbiased estimation (MVUE) in linear models. In this paper, we take a first step towards extending this result to non linear settings via…
Reinforcement learning studies how an agent should interact with an environment to maximize its cumulative reward. A standard way to study this question abstractly is to ask how many samples an agent needs from the environment to learn an…
Reinforcement learning techniques achieved human-level performance in several tasks in the last decade. However, in recent years, the need for interpretability emerged: we want to be able to understand how a system works and the reasons…
Through many recent successes in simulation, model-free reinforcement learning has emerged as a promising approach to solving continuous control robotic tasks. The research community is now able to reproduce, analyze and build quickly on…
Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) strengthens LLM reasoning, but training often oscillates between {entropy collapse} and {entropy explosion}. We trace both hazards to the mean baseline used in value-free RL (e.g., GRPO…
The information bottleneck principle is an elegant and useful approach to representation learning. In this paper, we investigate the problem of representation learning in the context of reinforcement learning using the information…
Risk-sensitive reinforcement learning (RL) has garnered significant attention in recent years due to the growing interest in deploying RL agents in real-world scenarios. A critical aspect of risk awareness involves modeling highly rare risk…
Uncertainty in optimization is often represented as stochastic parameters in the optimization model. In Predict-Then-Optimize approaches, predictions of a machine learning model are used as values for such parameters, effectively…
Machine learning is vital in high-stakes domains, yet conventional validation methods rely on averaging metrics like mean squared error (MSE) or mean absolute error (MAE), which fail to quantify extreme errors. Worst-case prediction…
Mixture models serve as one fundamental tool with versatile applications. However, their training techniques, like the popular Expectation Maximization (EM) algorithm, are notoriously sensitive to parameter initialization and often suffer…
We propose a new Q-learning variant, called 2RA Q-learning, that addresses some weaknesses of existing Q-learning methods in a principled manner. One such weakness is an underlying estimation bias which cannot be controlled and often…
Learned representations in deep reinforcement learning (DRL) have to extract task-relevant information from complex observations, balancing between robustness to distraction and informativeness to the policy. Such stable and rich…
Many real-world systems problems require reasoning about the long term consequences of actions taken to configure and manage the system. These problems with delayed and often sequentially aggregated reward, are often inherently…