Related papers: Robust Losses for Learning Value Functions
We study whether a risk-sensitive objective from asset-pricing theory -- recursive utility -- improves reinforcement learning for portfolio allocation. The Bellman equation under recursive utility involves a certainty equivalent (CE) of…
Recently, there has been a surge in interest in safe and robust techniques within reinforcement learning (RL). Current notions of risk in RL fail to capture the potential for systemic failures such as abrupt stoppages from system failures…
As Large Language Models (LLMs) continue to progress toward more advanced forms of intelligence, Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is increasingly seen as a key pathway toward achieving Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).…
Robust reinforcement learning (RL) under the average-reward criterion is essential for long-term decision-making, particularly when the environment may differ from its specification. However, a significant gap exists in understanding the…
This paper concerns the central issues of model robustness and sample efficiency in offline reinforcement learning (RL), which aims to learn to perform decision making from history data without active exploration. Due to uncertainties and…
Policy gradient methods are an appealing approach in reinforcement learning because they directly optimize the cumulative reward and can straightforwardly be used with nonlinear function approximators such as neural networks. The two main…
Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms still suffer from high sample complexity despite outstanding recent successes. The need for intensive interactions with the environment is especially observed in many widely popular policy gradient…
We explore why many recently proposed robust estimation problems are efficiently solvable, even though the underlying optimization problems are non-convex. We study the loss landscape of these robust estimation problems, and identify the…
Polynomial regression is a recurrent problem with a large number of applications. In computer vision it often appears in motion analysis. Whatever the application, standard methods for regression of polynomial models tend to deliver biased…
Bandit and reinforcement learning (RL) problems can often be framed as optimization problems where the goal is to maximize average performance while having access only to stochastic estimates of the true gradient. Traditionally, stochastic…
We propose policy gradient algorithms for solving a risk-sensitive reinforcement learning (RL) problem in on-policy as well as off-policy settings. We consider episodic Markov decision processes, and model the risk using the broad class of…
In this paper we argue for the fundamental importance of the value distribution: the distribution of the random return received by a reinforcement learning agent. This is in contrast to the common approach to reinforcement learning which…
Learning a predictive model of the mean return, or value function, plays a critical role in many reinforcement learning algorithms. Distributional reinforcement learning (DRL) has been shown to improve performance by modeling the value…
This paper proposes a novel formulation for reinforcement learning (RL) with large language models, explaining why and under what conditions the true sequence-level reward can be optimized via a surrogate token-level objective in policy…
While the traditional formulation of machine learning tasks is in terms of performance on average, in practice we are often interested in how well a trained model performs on rare or difficult data points at test time. To achieve more…
This paper proposes an adaptive penalized weighted mean regression for outlier detection of high-dimensional data. In comparison to existing approaches based on the mean shift model, the proposed estimators demonstrate robustness against…
Envisioned application areas for reinforcement learning (RL) include autonomous driving, precision agriculture, and finance, which all require RL agents to make decisions in the real world. A significant challenge hindering the adoption of…
In offline reinforcement learning, in-sample learning methods have been widely used to prevent performance degradation caused by evaluating out-of-distribution actions from the dataset. Extreme Q-learning (XQL) employs a loss function based…
We propose a novel algorithmic framework for distributional reinforcement learning, based on learning finite-dimensional mean embeddings of return distributions. We derive several new algorithms for dynamic programming and…
The empirical success of distributional reinforcement learning (RL) highly relies on the choice of distribution divergence equipped with an appropriate distribution representation. In this paper, we propose \textit{Sinkhorn distributional…