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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.

168,932 papers · 148 categories

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4691137182 · Jun 202019922001200920172026
48 results for goal reaching

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.

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 ↗

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.

We determine the optimal strategies for purchasing term life insurance and for investing in a risky financial market in order to maximize the probability of reaching a bequest goal while consuming from an investment account. We extend Bayraktar and Young (2015) by allowing the individual to purchase term life insurance…

2014-12-06abs ↗pdf ↗

We determine the optimal strategy for investing in a Black-Scholes market in order to maximize the probability that wealth at death meets a bequest goal bb, a type of goal-seeking problem, as pioneered by Dubins and Savage (1965, 1976). The individual consumes at a constant rate cc, so the level of wealth required fo…

2015-03-03abs ↗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 ↗

The paper examines how background risk affects portfolio selection and optimal reinsurance design.

problem Maximizing the probability of reaching a financial goal in the presence of background risk.
method Quantile formulation method to derive optimal solutions explicitly.
result The presence of background risk does not change the solution shape but alters the parameter values.

Method maps state space using landmarks for universal goal reaching.

problem Learning the Universal Value Function Approximator (UVFA) for long-range goals is challenging.
method Hierarchical modeling with a dynamic landmark-based map and a value network.
result The method enables agents to reach long-range goals at the early training stage.

LEXA learns to discover and achieve goals in unseen environments.

problem Learning to solve diverse tasks in complex visual environments without supervision.
method LEXA learns a world model from image inputs and uses it to train an explorer and an achiever policy from imagined rollouts.
result LEXA solves tasks specified as goal images zero-shot without additional learning.

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.

We determine how an individual can use life insurance to meet a bequest goal. We assume that the individual's consumption is met by an income, such as a pension, life annuity, or Social Security. Then, we consider the wealth that the individual wants to devote towards heirs (separate from any wealth related to the afor…

2014-02-21abs ↗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.

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.

A new method for robot manipulation tasks using imagined object goals.

problem Learning robot manipulation in sparse reward environments.
method Train objects to reach target positions, then use predictions to create a curriculum of tasks.
result Higher success rates in challenging learning scenarios compared to alternatives.

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.

Single neural network predicts ImageNet model parameters for faster training.

problem Training diverse ImageNet models requires significant resources and time.
method Trained a neural network to predict ImageNet model parameters and used them for initialization.
result Models initialized with predicted parameters converge faster and achieve competitive performance.

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 ↗

Hierarchical Foresight improves robot vision tasks by planning long-term goals.

problem Compounding uncertainty and scalability issues in long horizon video prediction.
method Subgoal generation and planning using hierarchical visual foresight (HVF).
result Achieves nearly 200% performance improvement in vision-based manipulation tasks.

Learning to control an environment without hand-crafted rewards or expert data remains challenging and is at the frontier of reinforcement learning research. We present an unsupervised learning algorithm to train agents to achieve perceptually-specified goals using only a stream of observations and actions. Our agent s…

2018-11-28abs ↗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 ↗

MpFL models clients as strategic players to reach equilibrium with less communication.

problem Real-world clients act independently with individual objectives, not aligned with a shared global model.
method MpFL uses game-theoretic modeling and PEARL-SGD algorithm for local updates and communication.
result PEARL-SGD reaches an equilibrium with less communication than non-local updates in stochastic setup.

A key challenge in complex visuomotor control is learning abstract representations that are effective for specifying goals, planning, and generalization. To this end, we introduce universal planning networks (UPN). UPNs embed differentiable planning within a goal-directed policy. This planning computation unrolls a for…

2018-04-02abs ↗pdf ↗

Goals for reinforcement learning problems are typically defined through hand-specified rewards. To design such problems, developers of learning algorithms must inherently be aware of what the task goals are, yet we often require agents to discover them on their own without any supervision beyond these sparse rewards. W…

2018-03-27abs ↗pdf ↗

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.

Directed exploration improves reinforcement learning efficiency and robustness.

problem Achieving good sample efficiency in reinforcement learning with efficient exploration.
method Directed exploration through goal-conditioned policies that are independent of uncertainty.
result Directed exploration is more efficient and robust to uncertainty than reward bonuses.

Our goal is to show the beauty and power of Alexandrov geometry by reaching interesting applications and theorems with a minimum of preparation. The topics include 1. Reshetnyak's gluing theorem, 2. Estimates on the number of collisions in billiards, 3. Reshetnyak's majorization theorem, 4. Hadamard--Cartan globalizati…

2017-01-12abs ↗pdf ↗

Exploration is a difficult challenge in reinforcement learning and even recent state-of-the art curiosity-based methods rely on the simple epsilon-greedy strategy to generate novelty. We argue that pure random walks do not succeed to properly expand the exploration area in most environments and propose to replace singl…

2018-07-05abs ↗pdf ↗

A method uses RL to learn abstractions for planning, improving robot navigation and manipulation tasks.

problem Planning requires suitable abstractions for states and transitions, which RL struggles with for temporally extended tasks.
method Goal-conditioned policies learned with RL are incorporated into planning, with a latent variable model representing valid states.
result Our method significantly outperforms prior work on image-based robot navigation and manipulation tasks.

The paper develops methods to create fair and transferable representations without subgroup discrimination.

problem Creating fair and transferable representations without discriminating subgroups in the population.
method The approach involves modifying data representations to meet fairness constraints, leveraging task similarities via low rank matrix factorization.
result The learned fair representation transfers well to novel tasks, improving prediction performance and fairness metrics.

Branch-and-bound (BnB) algorithms are widely used to solve combinatorial problems, and the performance crucially depends on its branching heuristic.In this work, we consider a typical problem of maximum common subgraph (MCS), and propose a branching heuristic inspired from reinforcement learning with a goal of reaching…

2019-05-15abs ↗pdf ↗

For a Lie group G and a smooth manifold W, we study the difference between smooth actions of G on W and bundles over the classifying space of G with fiber W and structure group Diff(W). In particular, we exhibit smooth manifold bundles over BSU(2) that are not induced by an action. The main tool for reaching this goal …

2018-02-06abs ↗pdf ↗

The paper optimizes insurance purchases for financial goals.

problem Maximizing probability of achieving financial goals with insurance.
method Analyzes deferred term insurance in deterministic and stochastic frameworks, considering income, consumption, and risky investment.
result Provides optimal insurance and investment strategies for achieving financial goals.