Related papers: Exponential Smoothing for Off-Policy Learning
Off-Policy Evaluation (OPE) is an important practical problem in algorithmic ranking systems, where the goal is to estimate the expected performance of a new ranking policy using only offline logged data collected under a different, logging…
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…
An influential line of recent work has focused on the generalization properties of unregularized gradient-based learning procedures applied to separable linear classification with exponentially-tailed loss functions. The ability of such…
We revisit the framework of Smart PAC learning, which seeks supervised learners which compete with semi-supervised learners that are provided full knowledge of the marginal distribution on unlabeled data. Prior work has shown that such…
Even when unable to run experiments, practitioners can evaluate prospective policies, using previously logged data. However, while the bandits literature has adopted a diverse set of objectives, most research on off-policy evaluation to…
Training large language models (LLMs) with reinforcement learning (RL) methods such as PPO and GRPO commonly relies on ratio clipping to stabilise updates. While effective at preventing instability, clipping discards information, introduces…
Recently smoothing deep neural network based classifiers via isotropic Gaussian perturbation is shown to be an effective and scalable way to provide state-of-the-art probabilistic robustness guarantee against $\ell_2$ norm bounded…
Imitation learning (IL) is a popular approach in the continuous control setting as among other reasons it circumvents the problems of reward mis-specification and exploration in reinforcement learning (RL). In IL from demonstrations, an…
Kullback-Leibler (KL) regularization is widely used in offline decision-making and offers several benefits, motivating recent work on the sample complexity of offline learning with respect to KL-regularized performance metrics.…
On-policy distillation (OPD) is increasingly used in LLM post-training because it can leverage a teacher model to provide dense supervision on student rollouts. The standard implementation, however, usually reduces distribution matching to…
Pseudo-Labeling is a simple and effective approach to semi-supervised learning. It requires criteria that guide the selection of pseudo-labeled data. The latter have been shown to crucially affect pseudo-labeling's generalization…
Recent work in imitation learning has shown that having an expert controller that is both suitably smooth and stable enables stronger guarantees on the performance of the learned controller. However, constructing such smoothed expert…
Importance sampling is a central idea underlying off-policy prediction in reinforcement learning. It provides a strategy for re-weighting samples from a distribution to obtain unbiased estimates under another distribution. However,…
We consider a personalized pricing problem in which we have data consisting of feature information, historical pricing decisions, and binary realized demand. The goal is to perform off-policy evaluation for a new personalized pricing policy…
Training neural networks with one-hot target labels often results in overconfidence and overfitting. Label smoothing addresses this issue by perturbing the one-hot target labels by adding a uniform probability vector to create a regularized…
Gradient clipping is a standard training technique used in deep learning applications such as large-scale language modeling to mitigate exploding gradients. Recent experimental studies have demonstrated a fairly special behavior in the…
In this paper, we study the convergence properties of off-policy policy improvement algorithms with state-action density ratio correction under function approximation setting, where the objective function is formulated as a max-max-min…
In this paper, we present a new policy gradient (PG) methods, namely the block policy mirror descent (BPMD) method for solving a class of regularized reinforcement learning (RL) problems with (strongly)-convex regularizers. Compared to the…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) has achieved remarkable success in safety-critical areas, but it can be weakened by adversarial attacks. Recent studies have introduced "smoothed policies" in order to enhance its robustness. Yet, it is still…
Partial label learning (PLL) aims to solve the problem where each training instance is associated with a set of candidate labels, one of which is the correct label. Most PLL algorithms try to disambiguate the candidate label set, by either…