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A common strategy in transfer learning is few shot fine-tuning, but its success is highly dependent on the quality of samples selected as training examples. Active learning methods such as uncertainty sampling and diversity sampling can…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-23 Wei Han , David Martinez , Anna Khanina , Lawrence Cavedon , Karin Verspoor

We introduce Random Reward Perturbation (RRP), a novel exploration strategy for reinforcement learning (RL). Our theoretical analyses demonstrate that adding zero-mean noise to environmental rewards effectively enhances policy diversity…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-11 Haozhe Ma , Guoji Fu , Zhengding Luo , Jiele Wu , Tze-Yun Leong

Human-designed reward functions for reinforcement learning (RL) agents are frequently misaligned with the humans' true, unobservable objectives, and thus act only as proxies. Optimizing for a misspecified proxy reward function often induces…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-30 Stephane Hatgis-Kessell , Logan Mondal Bhamidipaty , Emma Brunskill

For many tasks, the reward function is inaccessible to introspection or too complex to be specified procedurally, and must instead be learned from user data. Prior work has evaluated learned reward functions by evaluating policies optimized…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-19 Adam Gleave , Michael Dennis , Shane Legg , Stuart Russell , Jan Leike

Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents require the specification of a reward signal for learning behaviours. However, introduction of corrupt or stochastic rewards can yield high variance in learning. Such corruption may be a direct result of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-11-09 Joshua Romoff , Peter Henderson , Alexandre Piché , Vincent Francois-Lavet , Joelle Pineau

Recursive partitioning methods provide computationally efficient surrogates for the Wasserstein distance, yet their statistical behavior and their resolution in the small-discrepancy regime remain insufficiently understood. We study…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-20 Yufei Zhang , Tao Wang , Jingyi Zhang

Given two sources of evidence about a latent variable, one can combine the information from both by multiplying the likelihoods of each piece of evidence. However, when one or both of the observation models are misspecified, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-24 Dmitrii Krasheninnikov , Rohin Shah , Herke van Hoof

Distribution Regression (DR) on stochastic processes describes the learning task of regression on collections of time series. Path signatures, a technique prevalent in stochastic analysis, have been used to solve the DR problem. Recent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-15 Andrew Alden , Carmine Ventre , Blanka Horvath

In reinforcement learning with sparse rewards, demonstrations can accelerate learning, but determining when to imitate them remains challenging. We propose Smooth Policy Regularisation from Demonstrations (SPReD), a framework that addresses…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-03 Yujie Zhu , Charles A. Hepburn , Matthew Thorpe , Giovanni Montana

Cross-correlation is a popular signal processing technique used in numerous location tracking systems for obtaining reliable range information. However, its efficient design and practical implementation has not yet been achieved on mote…

Other Computer Science · Computer Science 2016-06-14 Prasant Misra , Wen Hu , Mingrui Yang , Marco Duarte , Sanjay Jha

Reward shaping is a technique in reinforcement learning that addresses the sparse-reward problem by providing more frequent and informative rewards. We introduce a self-adaptive and highly efficient reward shaping mechanism that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-03 Haozhe Ma , Zhengding Luo , Thanh Vinh Vo , Kuankuan Sima , Tze-Yun Leong

Synchronous stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is the most common method used for distributed training of deep learning models. In this algorithm, each worker shares its local gradients with others and updates the parameters using the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-09-22 Negar Foroutan Eghlidi , Martin Jaggi

Understanding what information neural networks capture is an essential problem in deep learning, and studying whether different models capture similar features is an initial step to achieve this goal. Previous works sought to define metrics…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-27 Yunzhen Feng , Runtian Zhai , Di He , Liwei Wang , Bin Dong

Numerous variable selection methods rely on a two-stage procedure, where a sparsity-inducing penalty is used in the first stage to predict the support, which is then conveyed to the second stage for estimation or inference purposes. In this…

Applications · Statistics 2015-05-28 Jean-Michel Bécu , Yves Grandvalet , Christophe Ambroise , Cyril Dalmasso

The large communication cost for exchanging gradients between different nodes significantly limits the scalability of distributed training for large-scale learning models. Motivated by this observation, there has been significant recent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-04 Leighton Pate Barnes , Huseyin A. Inan , Berivan Isik , Ayfer Ozgur

Exploration is critical for deep reinforcement learning in complex environments with high-dimensional observations and sparse rewards. To address this problem, recent approaches proposed to leverage intrinsic rewards to improve exploration,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-11 Mingqi Yuan , Bo Li , Xin Jin , Wenjun Zeng

Adaptive traffic signal control is one key avenue for mitigating the growing consequences of traffic congestion. Incumbent solutions such as SCOOT and SCATS require regular and time-consuming calibration, can't optimise well for multiple…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-05-03 Alvaro Cabrejas-Egea , Shaun Howell , Maksis Knutins , Colm Connaughton

Machine learning methods rely on data. However, gathering suitable data can be challenging due to availability constraints, cost, or the need for domain expertise. Expanding datasets with additional sources is a common response to limited…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-25 Xavier Cadet , Mateusz Nowak , Peter Chin

Oftentimes, environments for sequential decision-making problems can be quite sparse in the provision of evaluative feedback to guide reinforcement-learning agents. In the extreme case, long trajectories of behavior are merely punctuated…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-22 Akash Velu , Skanda Vaidyanath , Dilip Arumugam

Over the past few years, several approaches utilizing score-based diffusion have been proposed to sample from probability distributions, that is without having access to exact samples and relying solely on evaluations of unnormalized…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-04-15 Maxence Noble , Louis Grenioux , Marylou Gabrié , Alain Oliviero Durmus