arXiv Machine Learning

Generalized Gaussian Temporal Difference Error for Uncertainty-aware Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2408. 02295v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Conventional uncertainty-aware temporal difference (TD) learning often models TD errors as zero-mean Gaussian.

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 18

Model-based Bootstrap for Offline Policy Evaluation in Tabular Reinforcement Learning

The paper introduces a model-based bootstrap framework for uncertainty quantification in offline policy evaluation (OPE) within finite-horizon, time-inhomogeneous Markov decision processes. Unlike traditional bootstrap methods that resample entire episodes, this approach regenerates trajectories from an estimated MDP, enabling use of diverse offline data formats such as complete trajectories, transition-level observations, and trajectory fragments. The authors prove bootstrap distributional consistency, asymptotically valid confidence intervals, and consistent variance estimation, and demonstrate through simulations that the method yields tighter confidence intervals and more accurate variance estimates compared to existing techniques.

By Weiwei Wang, Yuqiang Li, Xianyi Wu, Bingyi Jing
arXiv AI
Jun 3

Local Guidance, Global Impact: Gaussian-Reshaped Trust Region Unlocks Behavior Transitions

arXiv:2606. 03382v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: While Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) demonstrates strong performance in stationary settings, we show that its standard optimization paradigm struggles in continual and non-stationary environments.

By Bingxu Liu, Jiashun Liu, Johan Obando-Ceron, Hao Wang, Runze Liu, Pablo Samuel Castro, Aaron Courville, Ling Pan