Related papers: DROP: Distributional and Regular Optimism and Pess…

This paper addresses a new interpretation of the traditional optimization method in reinforcement learning (RL) as optimization problems using reverse Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence, and derives a new optimization method using forward KL…

To obtain better value estimation in reinforcement learning, we propose a novel algorithm based on the double actor-critic framework with temporal difference error-driven regularization, abbreviated as TDDR. TDDR employs double actors, with…

This paper explores the impact of dynamic entropy tuning in Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms that train a stochastic policy. Its performance is compared against algorithms that train a deterministic one. Stochastic policies optimize a…

Overparameterized neural networks can be highly accurate on average on an i.i.d. test set yet consistently fail on atypical groups of the data (e.g., by learning spurious correlations that hold on average but not in such groups).…

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become popular in enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs), with Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) emerging as a widely used algorithm in recent systems. Despite GRPO's…

Limiting failures of machine learning systems is of paramount importance for safety-critical applications. In order to improve the robustness of machine learning systems, Distributionally Robust Optimization (DRO) has been proposed as a…

Standard reinforcement learning (RL) optimizes policies for reward but imposes few constraints on how decisions evolve over time. As a result, policies may achieve high performance while exhibiting temporally incoherent behavior such as…

Temporal difference (TD) methods constitute a class of methods for learning predictions in multi-step prediction problems, parameterized by a recency factor lambda. Currently the most important application of these methods is to temporal…

Performative prediction aims to model scenarios where predictive outcomes subsequently influence the very systems they target. The pursuit of a performative optimum (PO) -- minimizing performative risk -- is generally reliant on modeling of…

The concepts of risk-aversion, chance-constrained optimization, and robust optimization have developed significantly over the last decade. Statistical learning community has also witnessed a rapid theoretical and applied growth by relying…

Bias is a common problem inherent in recommender systems, which is entangled with users' preferences and poses a great challenge to unbiased learning. For debiasing tasks, the doubly robust (DR) method and its variants show superior…

Stochastic Optimization (SO) is a classical approach for optimization under uncertainty that typically requires knowledge about the probability distribution of uncertain parameters. As the latter is often unknown, Distributionally Robust…

In this paper, we prove that Distributional Reinforcement Learning (DistRL), which learns the return distribution, can obtain second-order bounds in both online and offline RL in general settings with function approximation. Second-order…

In reinforcement learning (RL), the consideration of multivariate reward signals has led to fundamental advancements in multi-objective decision-making, transfer learning, and representation learning. This work introduces the first…

Regularized estimators in the context of group variables have been applied successfully in model and feature selection in order to preserve interpretability. We formulate a Distributionally Robust Optimization (DRO) problem which recovers…

We revisit the estimation bias in policy gradients for the discounted episodic Markov decision process (MDP) from Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) perspective. The objective is formulated theoretically as the expected returns discounted…

The application of reinforcement learning (RL) to dynamic resource allocation in optical networks has been the focus of intense research activity in recent years, with almost 100 peer-reviewed papers. We present a review of progress in the…

Distributional reinforcement learning (RL) is a powerful framework increasingly adopted in safety-critical domains for its ability to optimize risk-sensitive objectives. However, the role of the discount factor is often overlooked, as it is…

The probabilistic diffusion model (DM), generating content by inferencing through a recursive chain structure, has emerged as a powerful framework for visual generation. After pre-training on enormous data, the model needs to be properly…

Online task scheduling serves an integral role for task-intensive applications in cloud computing and crowdsourcing. Optimal scheduling can enhance system performance, typically measured by the reward-to-cost ratio, under some task arrival…