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Summary of Pessimism Meets Risk: Risk-sensitive Offline Reinforcement Learning, by Dake Zhang et al.


Pessimism Meets Risk: Risk-Sensitive Offline Reinforcement Learning

by Dake Zhang, Boxiang Lyu, Shuang Qiu, Mladen Kolar, Tong Zhang

First submitted to arxiv on: 10 Jul 2024

Categories

  • Main: Machine Learning (cs.LG)
  • Secondary: Optimization and Control (math.OC); Statistics Theory (math.ST); Machine Learning (stat.ML)

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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
A recent study in risk-sensitive reinforcement learning (RL) tackles decision-making under uncertainty by applying the entropic risk measure to RL problems. The research focuses on linear Markov Decision Processes (MDPs), a theoretical framework that has yet to be explored from a risk-sensitive perspective. Two sample-efficient algorithms are introduced: a risk-sensitive pessimistic value iteration algorithm, which provides tight analysis using the structure of the risk-sensitive performance measure, and another pessimistic algorithm utilizing variance information and reference-advantage decomposition. These algorithms improve upon previous bounds by reducing dependence on space dimension d and risk-sensitivity factor.
Low GrooveSquid.com (original content) Low Difficulty Summary
Risk-sensitive reinforcement learning helps make better decisions in uncertain situations to minimize bad outcomes. This study uses a special way to measure risk called the entropic risk measure, which is important for making good choices. The researchers focus on a type of problem called linear Markov Decision Processes (MDPs), where they develop two new algorithms that are efficient and get close to the best possible solution.

Keywords

* Artificial intelligence  * Reinforcement learning