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Real-world applications require RL algorithms to act safely. During learning process, it is likely that the agent executes sub-optimal actions that may lead to unsafe/poor states of the system. Exploration is particularly brittle in…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-06-17 Elena Smirnova , Elvis Dohmatob , Jérémie Mary

In settings where Machine Learning (ML) algorithms automate or inform consequential decisions about people, individual decision subjects are often incentivized to strategically modify their observable attributes to receive more favorable…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-10 Keegan Harris , Daniel Ngo , Logan Stapleton , Hoda Heidari , Zhiwei Steven Wu

This paper studies the performative prediction problem which optimizes a stochastic loss function with data distribution that depends on the decision variable. We consider a setting where the agent(s) provides samples adapted to the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-10-05 Qiang Li , Hoi-To Wai

The goal of this paper is to analyze distributional Markov Decision Processes as a class of control problems in which the objective is to learn policies that steer the distribution of a cumulative reward toward a prescribed target law,…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-02-09 Nicole Bäuerle , Athanasios Vasileiadis

Policy gradient methods hold great potential for solving complex continuous control tasks. Still, their training efficiency can be improved by exploiting structure within the optimization problem. Recent work indicates that supervised…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-19 Jan Schneider , Pierre Schumacher , Simon Guist , Le Chen , Daniel Häufle , Bernhard Schölkopf , Dieter Büchler

Policy gradient based reinforcement learning algorithms coupled with neural networks have shown success in learning complex policies in the model free continuous action space control setting. However, explicitly parameterized policies are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-09-30 Oliver Richter , Roger Wattenhofer

Policy gradient methods have enjoyed great success in deep reinforcement learning but suffer from high variance of gradient estimates. The high variance problem is particularly exasperated in problems with long horizons or high-dimensional…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-03-21 Cathy Wu , Aravind Rajeswaran , Yan Duan , Vikash Kumar , Alexandre M Bayen , Sham Kakade , Igor Mordatch , Pieter Abbeel

In performative prediction, the choice of a model influences the distribution of future data, typically through actions taken based on the model's predictions. We initiate the study of stochastic optimization for performative prediction.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-22 Celestine Mendler-Dünner , Juan C. Perdomo , Tijana Zrnic , Moritz Hardt

Reinforcement learning algorithms require a large amount of samples; this often limits their real-world applications on even simple tasks. Such a challenge is more outstanding in multi-agent tasks, as each step of operation is more costly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-05 Yali Du , Chengdong Ma , Yuchen Liu , Runji Lin , Hao Dong , Jun Wang , Yaodong Yang

Predictive models are often introduced to decision-making tasks under the rationale that they improve performance over an existing decision-making policy. However, it is challenging to compare predictive performance against an existing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-13 Luke Guerdan , Amanda Coston , Kenneth Holstein , Zhiwei Steven Wu

Strategic classification studies the problem where self-interested individuals or agents manipulate their response to obtain favorable decision outcomes made by classifiers, typically turning to dishonest actions when they are less costly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Ziyuan Huang , Lina Alkarmi , Mingyan Liu

Sampling-based motion planners have experienced much success due to their ability to efficiently and evenly explore the state space. However, for many tasks, it may be more efficient to not uniformly explore the state space, especially when…

Robotics · Computer Science 2018-06-07 Clark Zhang , Jinwook Huh , Daniel D. Lee

In many predictive decision-making scenarios, such as credit scoring and academic testing, a decision-maker must construct a model that accounts for agents' propensity to "game" the decision rule by changing their features so as to receive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-26 Yonadav Shavit , Benjamin Edelman , Brian Axelrod

Humans are masters at quickly learning many complex tasks, relying on an approximate understanding of the dynamics of their environments. In much the same way, we would like our learning agents to quickly adapt to new tasks. In this paper,…

We propose a novel framework for analyzing the dynamics of distribution shift in real-world systems that captures the feedback loop between learning algorithms and the distributions on which they are deployed. Prior work largely models…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-31 Lauren Conger , Franca Hoffmann , Eric Mazumdar , Lillian Ratliff

Many real-world problems require trading off multiple competing objectives. However, these objectives are often in different units and/or scales, which can make it challenging for practitioners to express numerical preferences over…

Following the wide-spread adoption of machine learning models in real-world applications, the phenomenon of performativity, i.e. model-dependent shifts in the test distribution, becomes increasingly prevalent. Unfortunately, since models…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-01-21 Ivan Kirev , Lyuben Baltadzhiev , Nikola Konstantinov

Policy gradient methods have shown success in learning control policies for high-dimensional dynamical systems. Their biggest downside is the amount of exploration they require before yielding high-performing policies. In a lifelong…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-23 Jorge A. Mendez , Boyu Wang , Eric Eaton

In performative stochastic optimization, decisions can influence the distribution of random parameters, rendering the data-generating process itself decision-dependent. In practice, decision-makers rarely have access to the true…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-10-27 Zhuangzhuang Jia , Yijie Wang , Roy Dong , Grani A. Hanasusanto

We address the problem of learning to assign prediction tasks to one agent from a set of available human or AI agents. In particular, we focus on the sequential learning of agent expertise and assignment policies where each agent is…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Shang Wu , Saatvik Kher , Padhraic Smyth