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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.

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48 results for GOALS

Max entropy exploration guides reinforcement learning agents to pursue achievable goals.

problem Achieving distant test-time goals in long-horizon tasks.
method Optimize entropy of historical achieved goals by focusing on sparsely explored areas.
result Order of magnitude better sample efficiency on long-horizon multi-goal tasks.

Deep reinforcement learning has recently gained a focus on problems where policy or value functions are independent of goals. Evidence exists that the sampling of goals has a strong effect on the learning performance, but there is a lack of general mechanisms that focus on optimizing the goal sampling process. In this …

2018-09-17abs ↗pdf ↗

GARIM theory explains how conscious manipulation of internal representations enhances goal-directed behavior.

problem Limited understanding of how consciousness supports flexible goal-directed cognition.
method Extending a three-component theory of flexible cognition, proposing GARIM theory.
result Conscious states actively manipulate internal representations to align with goals, enhancing flexibility.

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…

2018-10-15abs ↗pdf ↗

Study optimal portfolio for households with two goals: random and fixed deadlines.

problem Optimal portfolio choice for households managing random and fixed deadlines.
method Maximizes weighted sum of probabilities of funding both goals in a Black-Scholes market.
result Non-monotonic value function due to interaction between goals under forced funding.

In Multi-Goal Reinforcement Learning, an agent learns to achieve multiple goals with a goal-conditioned policy. During learning, the agent first collects the trajectories into a replay buffer, and later these trajectories are selected randomly for replay. However, the achieved goals in the replay buffer are often biase…

2019-05-21abs ↗pdf ↗

A method for setting up an automatic curriculum for reinforcement learning tasks.

problem Improving sample efficiency in multi-task reinforcement learning.
method Propose a goal proposal module that prioritizes goals maximizing epistemic uncertainty of the Q-function.
result Significant performance gains over current methods in 13 multi-goal robotic tasks and 5 navigation tasks.

Financial institutions use LSTM models to predict customer goals.

problem Predicting customer goals and actions in financial services.
method Used LSTM models with state-space graph embeddings on historical customer traces.
result Demonstrated the effectiveness of LSTM models in predicting customer goals and actions.

Intrinsically motivated goal exploration processes enable agents to autonomously sample goals to explore efficiently complex environments with high-dimensional continuous actions. They have been applied successfully to real world robots to discover repertoires of policies producing a wide diversity of effects. Often th…

2018-07-04abs ↗pdf ↗

For an autonomous agent to fulfill a wide range of user-specified goals at test time, it must be able to learn broadly applicable and general-purpose skill repertoires. Furthermore, to provide the requisite level of generality, these skills must handle raw sensory input such as images. In this paper, we propose an algo…

2018-07-12abs ↗pdf ↗

DAGR improves navigation by refining goal representations conditioned on the current state.

problem Goal-conditioned reinforcement learning lacks state awareness, leading to inefficient policy recovery.
method DAGR refines static goal embeddings into state-conditioned ones using gated cross-attention with a state-goal discrepancy map.
result DAGR improves navigation tasks on OGBench, matching or outperforming base methods.

Sparse reward problems are one of the biggest challenges in Reinforcement Learning. Goal-directed tasks are one such sparse reward problems where a reward signal is received only when the goal is reached. One promising way to train an agent to perform goal-directed tasks is to use Hindsight Learning approaches. In thes…

2018-09-16abs ↗pdf ↗

Autonomous agents that must exhibit flexible and broad capabilities will need to be equipped with large repertoires of skills. Defining each skill with a manually-designed reward function limits this repertoire and imposes a manual engineering burden. Self-supervised agents that set their own goals can automate this pr…

2019-03-08abs ↗pdf ↗

Goal-oriented reinforcement learning has recently been a practical framework for robotic manipulation tasks, in which an agent is required to reach a certain goal defined by a function on the state space. However, the sparsity of such reward definition makes traditional reinforcement learning algorithms very inefficien…

2019-06-10abs ↗pdf ↗

A novel framework uses goal-conditioned reinforcement learning to generate diverse samples.

problem Generating high-quality, diverse samples from generative models.
method Two agents: GC-agent learns to reconstruct the training set, S-agent learns to imitate GC-agent without knowing the goals.
result Empirically, the method generates diverse and high-quality samples in image synthesis.

Eikonal-Constrained QRL improves goal-reaching in reinforcement learning.

problem Reward design and out-of-distribution generalization in reinforcement learning.
method Eikonal-Constrained Quasimetric Reinforcement Learning (Eik-QRL) using the Eikonal PDE.
result Eik-QRL achieves state-of-the-art performance in offline goal-conditioned navigation and manipulation tasks.

A new EM framework for goal-conditioned RL improves performance on sparse reward tasks.

problem Handling sparse rewards in goal-conditioned reinforcement learning.
method A graphical model framework with an EM algorithm that includes a learning-in-hindsight E-step and a supervised M-step.
result hEM significantly outperforms model-free baselines on goal-conditioned benchmarks with sparse rewards.

Reinforcement learning algorithms use correlations between policies and rewards to improve agent performance. But in dynamic or sparsely rewarding environments these correlations are often too small, or rewarding events are too infrequent to make learning feasible. Human education instead relies on curricula--the break…

2019-09-27abs ↗pdf ↗

OptiGAN uses GAN and RL to optimize sequence generation for specific goals.

problem Challenging in sequence generation tasks to generate sequences with specific desired goals.
method Integrates GAN and RL to optimize desired goal scores using policy gradients.
result Achieves higher desired scores in text and real-valued sequence generation.

We propose a novel framework to identify sub-goals useful for exploration in sequential decision making tasks under partial observability. We utilize the variational intrinsic control framework (Gregor et.al., 2016) which maximizes empowerment -- the ability to reliably reach a diverse set of states and show how to ide…

2019-07-24abs ↗pdf ↗

All-goals updating exploits the off-policy nature of Q-learning to update all possible goals an agent could have from each transition in the world, and was introduced into Reinforcement Learning (RL) by Kaelbling (1993). In prior work this was mostly explored in small-state RL problems that allowed tabular representati…

2018-06-22abs ↗pdf ↗

This work tackles long-term visual planning by goal-conditioned hierarchical predictors.

problem Current learning approaches fail on long-horizon tasks due to lack of goal information and coarse-to-fine planning.
method Formulate goal-conditioned predictors (GCPs) and hierarchical models to predict trajectories between observations.
result GCPs enable effective long-term planning with much longer horizons than before.

Investor aims to meet financial goals with deadlines and target amounts, considering stock trading costs.

problem Goal-based portfolio selection with fixed transaction costs.
method Stochastic Perron's method to show value function is unique viscosity solution to quasi-variational inequalities. Existence of optimal strategy established.
result Optimal trading strategy differs significantly from frictionless case, revealing complex regions and strategies.

PlanGAN uses GANs to plan efficient trajectories for multi-goal tasks in sparse reward environments.

problem Learning with sparse rewards in multi-goal environments.
method PlanGAN combines GANs to generate trajectories leading to specified goals, then combines these into a planning algorithm.
result PlanGAN achieves comparable performance to model-free RL but is 4-8 times more sample efficient.

Physics-informed GCRL tackles sparse feedback learning with hybrid dynamics.

problem Sparse feedback learning with high-dimensional, hybrid, or contact-dependent dynamics.
method Introduces physics-informed inductive biases into goal-conditioned value learning.
result Contact-rich manipulation tasks degrade existing Pi-GCRL methods.

Paper proposes a method to learn goal-reaching behaviors from scratch using imitation learning.

problem Current reinforcement learning algorithms are brittle and require expert demonstrations.
method Iterated supervised learning where agents relabel and imitate generated trajectories.
result Improved goal-reaching performance and robustness over current RL algorithms.

This paper proposes a method to learn from expert trajectories by decomposing tasks into sub-goals.

problem Learning complex goal-oriented tasks with sparse rewards and limited samples.
method The approach uses expert trajectories to decompose tasks into sub-goals, learning an extrinsic reward function and modulating sub-goal predictions.
result The method alleviates errors in imitation learning and solves complex tasks that other methods cannot.

GOIMDA selects inputs to maximize expected influence on a goal functional, reducing data acquisition needs.

problem Challenges in active data acquisition for learning and optimization tasks in deep neural networks.
method GOIMDA uses inverse curvature and goal gradient to select inputs maximizing expected influence on a specified goal functional.
result GOIMDA achieves target performance with fewer labeled samples or function evaluations compared to baselines.

This work improves imitation learning and goal-conditioned RL by estimating value densities.

problem Effective solutions for imitation and goal-conditioned reinforcement learning require reliably reaching specified states or demonstrations.
method The approach uses recent advances in density estimation to learn value functions efficiently and without hindsight bias.
result The method achieves state-of-the-art demonstration sample-efficiency in imitation learning and is both efficient and bias-free in goal-conditioned reinforcement learning.

Study combines chit-chat and goal-oriented dialogue in fantasy games.

problem Combining naturalistic chit-chat with goal-oriented tasks in fantasy games.
method Trained a goal-oriented model with reinforcement learning against an imitation-learned chit-chat model using two approaches.
result Both models outperform a baseline and can converse naturally to achieve goals.

Unified algorithm tackles various RL goals like reward-free and preference-based learning.

problem Unified approach to multiple RL learning goals.
method Decision-Estimation Coefficient (DEC) framework.
result Unified algorithm handles various learning goals with a single framework.