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.
We present a novel method for learning a set of disentangled reward functions that sum to the original environment reward and are constrained to be independently obtainable. We define independent obtainability in terms of value functions with respect to obtaining one learned reward while pursuing another learned reward…
Solving tasks in Reinforcement Learning is no easy feat. As the goal of the agent is to maximize the accumulated reward, it often learns to exploit loopholes and misspecifications in the reward signal resulting in unwanted behavior. While constraints may solve this issue, there is no closed form solution for general co…
Constrained Markov Decision Processes are a class of stochastic decision problems in which the decision maker must select a policy that satisfies auxiliary cost constraints. This paper extends upper confidence reinforcement learning for settings in which the reward function and the constraints, described by cost functi…
Optimizing rewards under budget constraints with correlated costs and rewards.
problem Maximizing total expected reward under a budget constraint on total cost with correlated and potentially heavy-tailed cost-reward pairs.
method Proposes algorithms exploiting correlation between cost and reward via linear minimum mean-square error estimation to achieve tight regret bounds.
result Achieves O(logB) regret for a budget B>0 under certain moment conditions.
In reinforcement learning, an agent attempts to learn high-performing behaviors through interacting with the environment, such behaviors are often quantified in the form of a reward function. However some aspects of behavior-such as ones which are deemed unsafe and to be avoided-are best captured through constraints. W…
A significant challenge for the practical application of reinforcement learning in the real world is the need to specify an oracle reward function that correctly defines a task. Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) seeks to avoid this challenge by instead inferring a reward function from expert behavior. While appealin…
This study mainly investigates two common decoding problems in neural keyphrase generation: sequence length bias and beam diversity. To tackle the problems, we introduce a beam search decoding strategy based on word-level and ngram-level reward function to constrain and refine Seq2Seq inference at test time. Results sh…
Autonomous agents must often deal with conflicting requirements, such as completing tasks using the least amount of time/energy, learning multiple tasks, or dealing with multiple opponents. In the context of reinforcement learning~(RL), these problems are addressed by (i)~designing a reward function that simultaneously…
We study contextual bandits with budget and time constraints, referred to as constrained contextual bandits.The time and budget constraints significantly complicate the exploration and exploitation tradeoff because they introduce complex coupling among contexts over time.Such coupling effects make it difficult to obtai…
Policy gradient algorithms typically combine discounted future rewards with an estimated value function, to compute the direction and magnitude of parameter updates. However, for most Reinforcement Learning tasks, humans can provide additional insight to constrain the policy learning. We introduce a general method to i…
In real-world decision-making problems, for instance in the fields of finance, robotics or autonomous driving, keeping uncertainty under control is as important as maximizing expected returns. Risk aversion has been addressed in the reinforcement learning literature through risk measures related to the variance of retu…
We present a fully nonparametric method to estimate the value function, via simulation, in the context of expected infinite-horizon discounted rewards for Markov chains. Estimating such value functions plays an important role in approximate dynamic programming and applied probability in general. We incorporate "soft in…
This work tackles risk-sensitive deep RL by optimizing policies with variance constraints.
problem Risk and aleatoric uncertainty in deep reinforcement learning.
method Lagrangian and Fenchel dualities to transform the problem into an unconstrained saddle-point policy optimization problem, and an actor-critic algorithm to iteratively update policy, Lagrange multiplier, and Fenchel dual variable.
result The proposed actor-critic algorithm finds a globally optimal policy at a sublinear rate.
Imitation Learning (IL) is an appealing approach to learn desirable autonomous behavior. However, directing IL to achieve arbitrary goals is difficult. In contrast, planning-based algorithms use dynamics models and reward functions to achieve goals. Yet, reward functions that evoke desirable behavior are often difficul…