An Offline Risk-aware Policy Selection Method for Bayesian Markov Decision Processes

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Angelotti, Giorgio, Drougard, Nicolas, Chanel, Caroline Ponzoni Carvalho
Format: Preprint
Published: 2021
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author Angelotti, Giorgio
Drougard, Nicolas
Chanel, Caroline Ponzoni Carvalho
author_facet Angelotti, Giorgio
Drougard, Nicolas
Chanel, Caroline Ponzoni Carvalho
contents In Offline Model Learning for Planning and in Offline Reinforcement Learning, the limited data set hinders the estimate of the Value function of the relative Markov Decision Process (MDP). Consequently, the performance of the obtained policy in the real world is bounded and possibly risky, especially when the deployment of a wrong policy can lead to catastrophic consequences. For this reason, several pathways are being followed with the scope of reducing the model error (or the distributional shift between the learned model and the true one) and, more broadly, obtaining risk-aware solutions with respect to model uncertainty. But when it comes to the final application which baseline should a practitioner choose? In an offline context where computational time is not an issue and robustness is the priority we propose Exploitation vs Caution (EvC), a paradigm that (1) elegantly incorporates model uncertainty abiding by the Bayesian formalism, and (2) selects the policy that maximizes a risk-aware objective over the Bayesian posterior between a fixed set of candidate policies provided, for instance, by the current baselines. We validate EvC with state-of-the-art approaches in different discrete, yet simple, environments offering a fair variety of MDP classes. In the tested scenarios EvC manages to select robust policies and hence stands out as a useful tool for practitioners that aim to apply offline planning and reinforcement learning solvers in the real world.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2105_13431
institution arXiv
publishDate 2021
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle An Offline Risk-aware Policy Selection Method for Bayesian Markov Decision Processes
Angelotti, Giorgio
Drougard, Nicolas
Chanel, Caroline Ponzoni Carvalho
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Systems and Control
In Offline Model Learning for Planning and in Offline Reinforcement Learning, the limited data set hinders the estimate of the Value function of the relative Markov Decision Process (MDP). Consequently, the performance of the obtained policy in the real world is bounded and possibly risky, especially when the deployment of a wrong policy can lead to catastrophic consequences. For this reason, several pathways are being followed with the scope of reducing the model error (or the distributional shift between the learned model and the true one) and, more broadly, obtaining risk-aware solutions with respect to model uncertainty. But when it comes to the final application which baseline should a practitioner choose? In an offline context where computational time is not an issue and robustness is the priority we propose Exploitation vs Caution (EvC), a paradigm that (1) elegantly incorporates model uncertainty abiding by the Bayesian formalism, and (2) selects the policy that maximizes a risk-aware objective over the Bayesian posterior between a fixed set of candidate policies provided, for instance, by the current baselines. We validate EvC with state-of-the-art approaches in different discrete, yet simple, environments offering a fair variety of MDP classes. In the tested scenarios EvC manages to select robust policies and hence stands out as a useful tool for practitioners that aim to apply offline planning and reinforcement learning solvers in the real world.
title An Offline Risk-aware Policy Selection Method for Bayesian Markov Decision Processes
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Systems and Control
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.13431