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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.

168,695 papers · 148 categories

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4078141,2201,627 · Jun 202019922001200920172026
48 results for Bayesian policy learning

POLAR learns efficient data acquisition policies using pretrained belief representations.

problem Challenges in learning effective policies for adaptive data acquisition.
method POLAR decouples representation learning from policy learning by leveraging pretrained predictive foundation models as belief-state encoders.
result POLAR outperforms state-of-the-art methods across diverse tasks while requiring fewer training samples.

Bayesian Markowitz portfolio problem shows entropy regularization is ineffective.

problem Entropy regularization in Bayesian Markowitz portfolio optimization.
method Combines continuous-time Bayesian filtering with stochastic policy optimization.
result Entropy regularization does not accelerate learning of unknown drift.

Unified Bayesian framework for efficient off-policy evaluation and learning in large action spaces.

problem Efficient off-policy evaluation and learning in systems with correlated actions.
method Unified Bayesian framework with structured priors and sDM approach.
result sDM leverages action correlations without compromising computational efficiency.

Unified framework for analyzing pessimism in off-policy learning with regularized importance sampling.

problem High variance in importance weighting for off-policy learning.
method Unified PAC-Bayesian study of pessimism with regularized importance sampling.
result Derivation of a tractable PAC-Bayesian generalization bound for common importance weight regularizations.

New approach to portfolio optimization shows entropy regularization is ineffective.

problem Entropy regularization in mean-variance portfolio optimization under drift uncertainty.
method Combining Bayesian filtering and stochastic policy optimization.
result Entropy regularization does not accelerate learning about unknown drift.

New approach for off-policy learning in contextual bandits with performance guarantees.

problem Improving performance of logging policies in contextual bandits.
method PAC-Bayesian analysis of policy mixtures, providing tighter generalization bounds and tractable optimization algorithms.
result Proved tighter generalization bounds and demonstrated effectiveness in practical scenarios.

Bayesian REX learns Atari games from demonstrations efficiently.

problem Bayesian reward learning for complex control problems is computationally intractable.
method Bayesian Reward Extrapolation (Bayesian REX) pre-trains a low-dimensional feature encoding and uses preferences to perform fast Bayesian inference.
result Bayesian REX learns Atari games from demonstrations in 5 minutes, competitive with state-of-the-art methods.

Scarce data is a major challenge to scaling robot learning to truly complex tasks, as we need to generalize locally learned policies over different "contexts". Bayesian optimization approaches to contextual policy search (CPS) offer data-efficient policy learning that generalize over a context space. We propose to impr…

2016-12-06abs ↗pdf ↗

BCPO optimizes offline RL policies by converting uncertainty into conservative bounds.

problem Offline RL's fragility under distribution shifts and model errors.
method Bayesian approach with credible lower bounds and KL regularization.
result BCPO yields an uncertainty-calibrated policy that avoids exploiting model errors.

Bayesian investor learns unknown asset drift, trades mean-variance optimal portfolio, but policy is robust to observation model distortion.

problem Bayesian portfolio selection with observation model distortion
method Robust Bayesian portfolio selection
result Robust policy and its price are closed form, with price of robustness half the variance of the non-robust investor's loss.

In the Bayesian approach to sequential decision making, exact calculation of the (subjective) utility is intractable. This extends to most special cases of interest, such as reinforcement learning problems. While utility bounds are known to exist for this problem, so far none of them were particularly tight. In this pa…

2011-06-18abs ↗pdf ↗

We introduce Bayesian least-squares policy iteration (BLSPI), an off-policy, model-free, policy iteration algorithm that uses the Bayesian least-squares temporal-difference (BLSTD) learning algorithm to evaluate policies. An online variant of BLSPI has been also proposed, called randomised BLSPI (RBLSPI), that improves…

2019-04-06abs ↗pdf ↗

Bayesian priors offer a compact yet general means of incorporating domain knowledge into many learning tasks. The correctness of the Bayesian analysis and inference, however, largely depends on accuracy and correctness of these priors. PAC-Bayesian methods overcome this problem by providing bounds that hold regardless …

2012-02-14abs ↗pdf ↗

We propose a probabilistic framework to directly insert prior knowledge in reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms by defining the behaviour policy as a Bayesian posterior distribution. Such a posterior combines task specific information with prior knowledge, thus allowing to achieve transfer learning across tasks. The …

2018-09-30abs ↗pdf ↗

Bayesian sOED uses PG reinforcement learning for efficient experiment design.

problem Optimizing sequential experiments for nonlinear models with limited data.
method Formulated as POMDP, solved via PG methods with neural network parameterization.
result Demonstrated advantages over batch and greedy designs in contaminant source inversion.

This work learns exploration policies for unknown distributions using samples and policy gradients.

problem Learning exploration policies for unknown distributions in Bayesian bandits.
method Meta-learning approach parameterizing policies in a differentiable way and optimizing them with policy gradients.
result Effective gradient estimators and variance reduction techniques are derived.

Bayesian inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) methods are ideal for safe imitation learning, as they allow a learning agent to reason about reward uncertainty and the safety of a learned policy. However, Bayesian IRL is computationally intractable for high-dimensional problems because each sample from the posterior req…

2019-12-10abs ↗pdf ↗

New method reduces over-pessimism in Bayesian control under parameter uncertainty.

problem Over-pessimism in Bayesian control due to misspecified priors.
method Distributionally robust Bayesian control (DRBC) with strong duality and optimization.
result Validated algorithm on synthetic and real data, reducing over-pessimism.

Robust optimization and statistical robustness improve robot navigation policies.

problem Efficiently finding optimal robot navigation policies in uncertain environments.
method Combining robust optimization and statistical robustness with improved Bayesian optimization techniques.
result Safe and repeatable robot navigation policies are achieved with improved robust optimization methods.

Scarce data is a major challenge to scaling robot learning to truly complex tasks, as we need to generalize locally learned policies over different task contexts. Contextual policy search offers data-efficient learning and generalization by explicitly conditioning the policy on a parametric context space. In this paper…

2019-04-26abs ↗pdf ↗

We state the problem of inverse reinforcement learning in terms of preference elicitation, resulting in a principled (Bayesian) statistical formulation. This generalises previous work on Bayesian inverse reinforcement learning and allows us to obtain a posterior distribution on the agent's preferences, policy and optio…

2011-04-29abs ↗pdf ↗

Paper solves Bayesian bandit problem with continuous-time limit and approximate policy.

problem Finding optimal policy in Bayesian bandit problems with large horizons.
method Reformulates Bayesian bandit problem as continuous Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman (HJB) equation and proposes approximate Bayes-optimal policy.
result Approximate Bayes-optimal policy for large horizons with constant computational cost.

The paper proposes a policy learning framework for interpretable personalization.

problem Effective personalization of goods and services to improve revenues and maintain competitive edge.
method Policy learning with linear decision boundaries using causal inference and Bayesian optimization.
result The learned policy improves net sales revenue by 88.2% and provides insights into important features.

Bayesian optimisation has been successfully applied to a variety of reinforcement learning problems. However, the traditional approach for learning optimal policies in simulators does not utilise the opportunity to improve learning by adjusting certain environment variables: state features that are unobservable and ran…

2016-05-24abs ↗pdf ↗

Bayesian optimization adapts domain parameters for more robust robot policies.

problem Learning policies for robot control from simulation data often fails in the real world due to the 'reality gap'.
method Bayesian Domain Randomization (BayRn) uses Bayesian optimization to adapt domain parameter distributions during training.
result BayRn achieves better sim-to-real transfer compared to fixed distribution methods.

Tabular Q-learning outperforms advanced RL methods in monetary policy.

problem Dynamic setting of short-term interest rates to stabilize inflation and unemployment under uncertain macroeconomic conditions.
method Discrete-action Markov Decision Process with tabular Q-learning, SARSA, Actor-Critic, Deep Q-Networks, Bayesian Q-learning, POMDP formulations.
result Standard tabular Q-learning achieved the best performance (-615.13 +- 309.58 mean return) compared to advanced RL methods and traditional policy rules.

Paper uses imitation learning to create efficient insulin policies from MPC demonstrations.

problem Resource-constrained medical devices struggle with complex MPC optimizations and state estimation errors.
method Imitation learning of neural network policies from MPC-computed demonstrations, using Bayesian inference with Monte Carlo Dropout.
result Trained policies generalize well to different patient cohorts, outperforming traditional MPC with state estimation.

BOMS enhances offline MBRL by improving model selection with Bayesian optimization.

problem Inaccurate model selection in offline MBRL due to distribution shift.
method Proposes BOMS, an active model selection framework using Bayesian optimization.
result Improves model selection with only a small amount of online interaction.

Step-DAD improves BED by periodically updating a design policy during experiments.

problem Improving flexibility and robustness in Bayesian experimental design.
method Semi-amortized, policy-based approach that updates a design policy during data collection.
result Consistently superior decision-making and robustness compared to current BED methods.

Bayesian RL tackles uncertainty with deep generative models and sequential samplers.

problem Optimal decision-making in uncertain environments with limited data.
method Bayesian approach using deep generative models and prequential scoring rule for posterior inference. Policy learning via expected Thompson sampling.
result Improves policy learning in high-dimensional parameter spaces and continuous action spaces.

ICEE learns new RL tasks in less time with a Transformer model.

problem Efficient in-context policy learning for reinforcement learning.
method In-context Exploration-Exploitation (ICEE) algorithm that optimizes efficiency without explicit Bayesian inference.
result ICEE solves Bayesian optimization problems as efficiently as Gaussian process biased methods but in significantly less time.