Related papers: Model-Based Uncertainty in Value Functions
In online reinforcement learning, data scarcity creates epistemic uncertainty that makes robustness important early in learning, whereas sufficient exploration is needed to learn the true-environment optimal policy. We study this…
Reinforcement learning systems are often concerned with balancing exploration of untested actions against exploitation of actions that are known to be good. The benefit of exploration can be estimated using the classical notion of Value of…
The explore{exploit dilemma is one of the central challenges in Reinforcement Learning (RL). Bayesian RL solves the dilemma by providing the agent with information in the form of a prior distribution over environments; however, full…
Deep learning has the potential to dramatically impact navigation and tracking state estimation problems critical to autonomous vehicles and robotics. Measurement uncertainties in state estimation systems based on Kalman and other Bayes…
We investigate model-based reinforcement learning in contextual Markov decision processes (C-MDPs) in which the context is unobserved and induces confounding in the offline dataset. In such settings, conventional model-learning methods are…
Conveying complex objectives to reinforcement learning (RL) agents often requires meticulous reward engineering. Preference-based RL methods are able to learn a more flexible reward model based on human preferences by actively incorporating…
We study estimation and statistical inference for reward models used in aligning large language models (LLMs). A key component of LLM alignment is reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), where humans compare pairs of…
We investigate statistical uncertainty quantification for reinforcement learning (RL) and its implications in exploration policy. Despite ever-growing literature on RL applications, fundamental questions about inference and error…
Uncertainty quantification is crucial for building reliable and trustable machine learning systems. We propose to estimate uncertainty in recurrent neural networks (RNNs) via stochastic discrete state transitions over recurrent timesteps.…
In this paper, we approach the problem of uncertainty quantification in deep learning through a predictive framework, which captures uncertainty in model parameters by specifying our assumptions about the predictive distribution of unseen…
Neural networks have proven successful at learning from complex data distributions by acting as universal function approximators. However, they are often overconfident in their predictions, which leads to inaccurate and miscalibrated…
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…
Reward models are central to aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences. Yet most approaches rely on pointwise reward estimates that overlook the epistemic uncertainty in reward models arising from limited human feedback.…
Reinforcement learning (RL) systems typically optimize scalar reward functions that assume precise and reliable evaluation of outcomes. However, real-world objectives--especially those derived from human preferences--are often uncertain,…
In this paper, we study the problem of uncertainty estimation and calibration for LLMs. We begin by formulating the uncertainty estimation problem, a relevant yet underexplored area in existing literature. We then propose a supervised…
Bayesian model comparison (BMC) offers a principled probabilistic approach to study and rank competing models. In standard BMC, we construct a discrete probability distribution over the set of possible models, conditional on the observed…
While reinforcement learning algorithms provide automated acquisition of optimal policies, practical application of such methods requires a number of design decisions, such as manually designing reward functions that not only define the…
In reinforcement learning the Q-values summarize the expected future rewards that the agent will attain. However, they cannot capture the epistemic uncertainty about those rewards. In this work we derive a new Bellman operator with…
Model-based Deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) assumes the availability of a model of an environment's underlying transition dynamics. This model can be used to predict future effects of an agent's possible actions. When no such model is…
ML models have errors when used for predictions. The errors are unknown but can be quantified by model uncertainty. When multiple ML models are trained using the same training points, their model uncertainties may be statistically…