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 |
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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