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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.

168,657 papers · 148 categories

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7152229 · Jun 202019922001200920172026
48 results for Episodic

Algorithm tackles constrained reinforcement learning with concave-convex and knapsack constraints.

problem Constrained episodic reinforcement learning with concave rewards and convex constraints.
method Modular analysis with strong theoretical guarantees for concave-convex and knapsack settings.
result Significantly outperforms existing approaches in constrained episodic environments.

We consider online learning in episodic loop-free Markov decision processes (MDPs), where the loss function can change arbitrarily between episodes, and the transition function is not known to the learner. We show O~(LXAT)\tilde{O}(L|X|\sqrt{|A|T}) regret bound, where TT is the number of episodes, XX is the state space, $A…

2019-05-19abs ↗pdf ↗

Many interesting real world domains involve reinforcement learning (RL) in partially observable environments. Efficient learning in such domains is important, but existing sample complexity bounds for partially observable RL are at least exponential in the episode length. We give, to our knowledge, the first partially …

2016-05-25abs ↗pdf ↗

Algorithm improves online learning in adversarial bandits.

problem Online learning in adversarial multi-armed bandits with non-uniform best arm distribution.
method Online-within-online setup, inner and outer learners, leveraging non-uniform empirical distribution of best arms.
result Improves regret bounds for non-uniform best arm distributions.

Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms have made huge progress in recent years by leveraging the power of deep neural networks (DNN). Despite the success, deep RL algorithms are known to be sample inefficient, often requiring many rounds of interaction with the environments to obtain satisfactory performance. Recently,…

2018-05-19abs ↗pdf ↗

We introduce a new class of reinforcement learning methods referred to as {\em episodic multi-armed bandits} (eMAB). In eMAB the learner proceeds in {\em episodes}, each composed of several {\em steps}, in which it chooses an action and observes a feedback signal. Moreover, in each step, it can take a special action, c…

2015-08-04abs ↗pdf ↗

New rule reduces exploration regret to logarithmic, improving bad episode handling.

problem Improving exploration regret in average reward MDPs.
method Replacing Doubling Trick with Vanishing Multiplicative rule in EVI-based algorithms.
result Regret is logarithmic under the new rule, significantly better than linear.

We introduce a lifelong language learning setup where a model needs to learn from a stream of text examples without any dataset identifier. We propose an episodic memory model that performs sparse experience replay and local adaptation to mitigate catastrophic forgetting in this setup. Experiments on text classificatio…

2019-06-03abs ↗pdf ↗

Improved reinforcement learning for episodes with varying action sets.

problem Reinforcement learning with context-dependent action sets.
method Extends MVP algorithm to handle adversarial and stochastic contexts.
result Established minimax regret bounds of O(SAH3KlogL)O(\sqrt{SAH^3K\log L}) for adversarial contexts.

New algorithm for average reward learning with bounded hitting time assumption.

problem Minimizing regret in average reward reinforcement learning with bounded hitting time.
method Optimistic Q-learning with a novel L\overline{L} operator for bounded hitting time.
result Regret bound of ildeO(H5SAT) ilde{O}(H^5 S\sqrt{AT}) for average reward learning.

This paper explores how environmental properties can simplify reinforcement learning in non-episodic settings.

problem Challenges in reinforcement learning with continuous interaction and sparse delayed rewards.
method Analysis of environment shaping and dynamism properties to simplify learning.
result Properties like environment shaping and dynamism can significantly ease learning in non-episodic, sparse reward settings.

Study finds stock prices rarely appreciate during capital inflows but often appreciate during normal flows.

problem Understanding stock price behavior during capital inflows and outflows.
method Identified capital flow episodes using threshold and k-means clustering; detected stock index changepoints using PELT method; combined results over identified capital flows.
result Stock prices rarely appreciate during capital inflows but often appreciate during normal flows.

In continual learning (CL), an agent learns from a stream of tasks leveraging prior experience to transfer knowledge to future tasks. It is an ideal framework to decrease the amount of supervision in the existing learning algorithms. But for a successful knowledge transfer, the learner needs to remember how to perform …

2019-02-27abs ↗pdf ↗

Paper proposes RRD to learn proxy rewards for sparse delayed rewards in episodic reinforcement learning.

problem Learning from sparse and delayed rewards in reinforcement learning.
method Randomized Return Decomposition (RRD) algorithm to redistribute rewards.
result Substantial improvement over baseline algorithms in experiments.

Long horizon reinforcement learning is as hard as short horizon learning.

problem Understanding the difficulty of long horizon reinforcement learning problems.
method Introduced new concepts: ε-net for optimal policies and Online Trajectory Synthesis algorithm.
result Proved that sample complexity scales logarithmically with the planning horizon, refuting the conjecture.

State of the art deep reinforcement learning algorithms take many millions of interactions to attain human-level performance. Humans, on the other hand, can very quickly exploit highly rewarding nuances of an environment upon first discovery. In the brain, such rapid learning is thought to depend on the hippocampus and…

2016-06-14abs ↗pdf ↗

We consider a reinforcement learning (RL) setting in which the agent interacts with a sequence of episodic MDPs. At the start of each episode the agent has access to some side-information or context that determines the dynamics of the MDP for that episode. Our setting is motivated by applications in healthcare where ba…

2017-11-15abs ↗pdf ↗

Current deep neural networks can achieve remarkable performance on a single task. However, when the deep neural network is continually trained on a sequence of tasks, it seems to gradually forget the previous learned knowledge. This phenomenon is referred to as \textit{catastrophic forgetting} and motivates the field c…

2019-09-25abs ↗pdf ↗

Most provably-efficient learning algorithms introduce optimism about poorly-understood states and actions to encourage exploration. We study an alternative approach for efficient exploration, posterior sampling for reinforcement learning (PSRL). This algorithm proceeds in repeated episodes of known duration. At the sta…

2013-06-04abs ↗pdf ↗

Meta-learning agents excel at rapidly learning new tasks from open-ended task distributions; yet, they forget what they learn about each task as soon as the next begins. When tasks reoccur - as they do in natural environments - metalearning agents must explore again instead of immediately exploiting previously discover…

2018-05-24abs ↗pdf ↗

PS4POMDPs algorithm simplifies online learning for episodic POMDPs with unknown models.

problem Learning in POMDPs is harder than in MDPs; online learning is especially challenging.
method Posterior Sampling-based reinforcement learning algorithm (PS4POMDPs)
result Bayesian regret scales as √number of episodes and is polynomial in other parameters.

StepMix algorithm ensures safe exploration in reinforcement learning with near-optimal performance.

problem Conservative exploration in reinforcement learning under episode-wise constraints.
method StepMix algorithm balances exploitation and exploration while ensuring episode-wise conservative constraint.
result StepMix achieves near-optimal regret order as in the constraint-free setting.

Quantum UCB algorithm reduces reinforcement learning regret exponentially.

problem Episodic reinforcement learning with quantum state evolution.
method Upper Confidence Bound (UCB) quantum algorithm with quantum mean estimation.
result Exponential improvement in regret from $\Tilde{\mathcal{O}}(\sqrt{K})$ to $\Tilde{\mathcal{O}}(1)$.

Algorithm learns both stochastic and adversarial MDPs with best-of-both-worlds guarantees.

problem Learning episodic MDPs with known transition and bandit feedback.
method Follow-the-Regularized-Leader method with a hybrid regularizer.
result Achieves O(logT)\mathcal{O}(log T) regret for stochastic losses and ildeO(T) ilde{\mathcal{O}}(\sqrt{T}) regret for adversarial losses.

We discuss memory models which are based on tensor decompositions using latent representations of entities and events. We show how episodic memory and semantic memory can be realized and discuss how new memory traces can be generated from sensory input: Existing memories are the basis for perception and new memories ar…

2017-08-09abs ↗pdf ↗

The success of popular algorithms for deep reinforcement learning, such as policy-gradients and Q-learning, relies heavily on the availability of an informative reward signal at each timestep of the sequential decision-making process. When rewards are only sparsely available during an episode, or a rewarding feedback i…

2018-05-25abs ↗pdf ↗

New algorithm reduces reinforcement learning complexity, approaching contextual bandits.

problem Episodic reinforcement learning's difficulty compared to contextual bandits.
method Proposes MVP algorithm with a new Bernstein-type bonus for episodic reinforcement learning.
result Achieves near-optimal regret bound of $O\left(\left(\sqrt{SAK} + S^2A ight) \poly\log \left(SAHK ight) ight)$, improving state-of-the-art results.

Recently, there has been significant progress in understanding reinforcement learning in discounted infinite-horizon Markov decision processes (MDPs) by deriving tight sample complexity bounds. However, in many real-world applications, an interactive learning agent operates for a fixed or bounded period of time, for ex…

2015-10-29abs ↗pdf ↗

We propose a new reinforcement learning algorithm for partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDP) based on spectral decomposition methods. While spectral methods have been previously employed for consistent learning of (passive) latent variable models such as hidden Markov models, POMDPs are more challenging…

2016-02-25abs ↗pdf ↗