Summary of Saver: Optimal Data Collection Strategy For Safe Policy Evaluation in Tabular Mdp, by Subhojyoti Mukherjee et al.
SaVeR: Optimal Data Collection Strategy for Safe Policy Evaluation in Tabular MDP
by Subhojyoti Mukherjee, Josiah P. Hanna, Robert Nowak
First submitted to arxiv on: 4 Jun 2024
Categories
- Main: Machine Learning (cs.LG)
- Secondary: None
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| Summary difficulty | Written by | Summary |
|---|---|---|
| High | Paper authors | High Difficulty Summary Read the original abstract here |
| Medium | GrooveSquid.com (original content) | Medium Difficulty Summary This paper explores the challenge of collecting data safely for evaluating policies in tabular Markov decision processes (MDPs). In policy evaluation, a target policy’s expected cumulative reward is estimated given a behavior policy that collects data. The authors consider not only selecting the optimal behavior policy but also enforcing a safety constraint: ensuring the cumulative cost of all behavior policies run does not exceed a certain constant factor times the default policy’s expected cost. They prove that intractable MDPs exist where no efficient safe oracle algorithm can collect data while satisfying the safety constraints, and introduce the SaVeR algorithm to approximate the safe oracle algorithm. The authors demonstrate that SaVeR produces accurate policy evaluations with low mean squared error (MSE) while respecting the safety constraint. |
| Low | GrooveSquid.com (original content) | Low Difficulty Summary This paper is about finding a way to safely collect data for evaluating policies in complex systems. Imagine you want to predict how well a certain strategy will work, but you need data to make that prediction. The authors are looking for the best way to gather this data without causing too much harm or waste. They show that some situations are difficult to solve using traditional methods and propose a new approach called SaVeR. This algorithm helps us collect data while staying within certain safety limits. The authors test their approach in simulations and find that it works well. |
Keywords
» Artificial intelligence » Mse
