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arXiv research

A locally-built, LLM-digested index of recent arXiv papers in quant finance, geometry/topology, and statistical ML — keyword search served straight from SQLite on this machine.

168,742 papers · 148 categories

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8.3%16.7%25.0%33.3% · Jan 199319922001200920172026
48 results for Advantage Estimation

Bayesian estimators for causal inference using hierarchical Gaussian Processes.

problem Estimating causal effects in sharp and fuzzy RD/RK designs.
method Hierarchical Gaussian Process models for regression and classification.
result Hierarchical GP models improve precision and coverage of RD/RK estimations.

The estimation of advantage is crucial for a number of reinforcement learning algorithms, as it directly influences the choices of future paths. In this work, we propose a family of estimates based on the order statistics over the path ensemble, which allows one to flexibly drive the learning process, towards or agains…

2019-09-15abs ↗pdf ↗

This paper improves Q-learning bounds using reference-advantage decomposition.

problem Improving Q-learning bounds in MDPs with positive suboptimality gaps.
method Develops a novel error decomposition framework to prove gap-dependent regret bounds.
result Establishes logarithmic gap-dependent regret bounds for Q-learning.

Paper introduces DTAE to optimize RL algorithms, balancing exploration and exploitation.

problem Balancing exploration and exploitation in reinforcement learning.
method Soft policy optimization with entropy and dual-track advantage estimator (DTAE).
result DTAE accelerates RL algorithm convergence and improves performance.

Deep neural networks outperform other methods in estimating non-smooth functions with singularities.

problem Estimating functions with singularities on hypersurfaces.
method Developed a minimax rate analysis for DNNs, proving their almost optimal convergence rate.
result DNNs outperform other estimators in estimating non-smooth functions with singularities.

In traditional reinforcement learning, an agent maximizes the reward collected during its interaction with the environment by approximating the optimal policy through the estimation of value functions. Typically, given a state s and action a, the corresponding value is the expected discounted sum of rewards. The optima…

2018-06-10abs ↗pdf ↗

We present a method to derive local estimates for some classes of fully nonlinear elliptic equations. The advantage of our method is that we derive Hessian estimates directly from C0C^0 estimates. Also, the method is flexible and can be applied to a large class of equations.

2005-10-29abs ↗pdf ↗

Infinite horizon off-policy policy evaluation is a highly challenging task due to the excessively large variance of typical importance sampling (IS) estimators. Recently, Liu et al. (2018a) proposed an approach that significantly reduces the variance of infinite-horizon off-policy evaluation by estimating the stationar…

2019-10-16abs ↗pdf ↗

Proposes a new simulator for complex arrival processes.

problem Modeling and simulating complex arrival processes with non-stationary and multi-dimensional rates.
method Integrates Monte Carlo and GANs to model a broad class of arrival processes.
result Consistent and efficient estimation of the simulator using Wasserstein distance.

After presenting Actor Critic Methods (ACM), we show ACM are control variate estimators. Using the projection theorem, we prove that the Q and Advantage Actor Critic (A2C) methods are optimal in the sense of the L2L^2 norm for the control variate estimators spanned by functions conditioned by the current state and acti…

2019-07-23abs ↗pdf ↗

Policy optimization on high-dimensional continuous control tasks exhibits its difficulty caused by the large variance of the policy gradient estimators. We present the action subspace dependent gradient (ASDG) estimator which incorporates the Rao-Blackwell theorem (RB) and Control Variates (CV) into a unified framework…

2018-05-09abs ↗pdf ↗

TROLL improves RL for LLMs by replacing clipping with a trust region projection.

problem Clipping in RL for LLMs causes instability and suboptimal performance.
method TROLL uses a discrete differentiable trust region projection to replace clipping, balancing computational cost and effectiveness.
result TROLL consistently outperforms PPO-like clipping in training speed, stability, and final success rates.

High-dimensional sparse modeling via regularization provides a powerful tool for analyzing large-scale data sets and obtaining meaningful, interpretable models. The use of nonconvex penalty functions shows advantage in selecting important features in high dimensions, but the global optimality of such methods still dema…

2016-05-11abs ↗pdf ↗

Entrocraft addresses RL performance saturation in LLMs by customizing entropy curves.

problem Performance saturation in RL algorithms for LLMs.
method Entrocraft uses rejection sampling to bias advantage distributions for customized entropy schedules.
result Entrocraft significantly improves generalization, output diversity, and long-term training in 4B models.

New federated method preserves privacy and estimates treatment effects.

problem Privacy-preserving causal inference for multi-site studies.
method Multiply robust nuisance function estimation, transfer learning.
result Efficient and optimal treatment effect estimation under different scenarios.

Quantum method speeds up risk estimation for insurance tail risks.

problem Sample-sparsity in classical Monte Carlo methods for tail risk pricing.
method Quantum Amplitude Estimation (QAE) with Grover amplification.
result Quantum method achieves convergence approaching order reciprocal N, enabling high-resolution tail estimation within practical budgets.

GANICE improves GAN-based causal inference by minimizing averaged Wasserstein risk.

problem Estimating interventional outcome distributions and quantiles in causal inference.
method GANICE uses extended Wasserstein distance and a cellwise critic to minimize averaged Wasserstein risk.
result GANICE achieves minimax optimality and consistently outperforms existing methods.

The scalability of statistical estimators is of increasing importance in modern applications. One approach to implementing scalable algorithms is to compress data into a low dimensional latent space using dimension reduction methods. In this paper we develop an approach for dimension reduction that exploits the assumpt…

2015-04-13abs ↗pdf ↗

We study the problem of finding the most mutually correlated arms among many arms. We show that adaptive arms sampling strategies can have significant advantages over the non-adaptive uniform sampling strategy. Our proposed algorithms rely on a novel correlation estimator. The use of this accurate estimator allows us t…

2014-04-23abs ↗pdf ↗

New proof for stability estimates in complex equations without pluripotential theory.

problem Stability estimates for complex Monge-Ampère and Hessian equations.
method New proof using general degenerations of background metrics.
result Uniform stability estimates for both equations under various degenerations.

The authors propose a parametric model called the arena model for prediction in paired competitions, i.e. paired comparisons with eliminations and bifurcations. The arena model has a number of appealing advantages. First, it predicts the results of competitions without rating many individuals. Second, it takes full adv…

2018-11-25abs ↗pdf ↗

New approach optimizes policies in adversarial MDPs using adversarial learning.

problem Optimizing policies in adversarial Markov decision processes.
method Adversarial learning on advantage functions, extending previous reductions.
result Stronger regret criteria and performance guarantees for policy optimization.

We propose an estimation method for the conditional mode when the conditioning variable is high-dimensional. In the proposed method, we first estimate the conditional density by solving quantile regressions multiple times. We then estimate the conditional mode by finding the maximum of the estimated conditional density…

2017-12-23abs ↗pdf ↗

DRL agents perform poorly at high decision frequencies, but a new algorithm improves performance.

problem DRL agents struggle at high decision frequencies, leading to poor performance.
method Proved that DRL agents' action-conditioned return distributions collapse to their policy's return distribution as decision frequency increases. Defined superiority as a probabilistic generalization of advantage for high-frequency value-based RL.
result Proper modeling of superiority distribution improves performance of controllers at high decision frequencies.

Distributed securities exchanges may become de facto fragmented if they span geographical regions with asymmetric computer infrastructure. First, we build an economic model of a decentralized exchange with two miner clusters, standing in for compact areas of economic activity (e.g., cities). "Local" miners in the area …

2019-10-24abs ↗pdf ↗

Bayesian SAE model with spectral clustering and uncertainty quantification.

problem Small Area Estimation (SAE) with uncertainty quantification.
method Spectral clustering with external covariates, posterior projections, and CPMSE.
result Closed form expressions for posterior mean estimators and CPMSE.

New model learning objective improves continuous control tasks.

problem Challenges in solving continuous control tasks using model-based reinforcement learning.
method Derived a novel value-aware model learning objective and identified and addressed stale value estimates issue.
result Value-aware objectives can be successfully deployed in solving continuous control tasks without tuning hyper-parameters.

Paper develops a new estimator for high-dimensional panel data with common shocks.

problem Cross-sectionally dependent errors driven by common shocks in high-dimensional panel data.
method Factor-augmented sparse-group LASSO estimator combining MIDAS aggregation with latent factors.
result The estimator outperforms standard LASSO for prediction and estimation in settings with cross-sectional dependence.

We extend CS divergence to conditional distributions and show its advantages in time series data and sequential decision making.

problem Quantifying the closeness between conditional distributions.
method Developed and estimated a conditional Cauchy-Schwarz divergence using kernel density estimation.
result Conditional CS divergence outperforms previous methods in time series clustering and sequential decision making.

Recent policy optimization approaches have achieved substantial empirical success by constructing surrogate optimization objectives. The Approximate Policy Iteration objective (Schulman et al., 2015a; Kakade and Langford, 2002) has become a standard optimization target for reinforcement learning problems. Using this ob…

2019-10-09abs ↗pdf ↗

New method tightens variational representations of divergences for faster learning.

problem Improving tightness of variational representations of divergences for faster statistical estimation.
method Improved objective functionals constructed via an auxiliary optimization problem, leveraging neural network approximation.
result Tighter variational representations can result in significantly faster learning and more accurate estimation of divergences.

Develops a novel fast bootstrap for dependent data with higher-order accuracy.

problem Estimation of parametric and semi-parametric models for dependent data.
method i.i.d. resampling of smoothed moment indicators, asymptotic refinements under mild assumptions.
result Higher-order correct asymptotic confidence distributions and confidence intervals.