Online Estimation and Inference for Robust Policy Evaluation in Reinforcement Learning

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Liu, Weidong, Tu, Jiyuan, Chen, Xi, Zhang, Yichen
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2023
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author Liu, Weidong
Tu, Jiyuan
Chen, Xi
Zhang, Yichen
author_facet Liu, Weidong
Tu, Jiyuan
Chen, Xi
Zhang, Yichen
contents Reinforcement learning has emerged as one of the prominent topics attracting attention in modern statistical learning, with policy evaluation being a key component. Unlike the traditional machine learning literature on this topic, our work emphasizes statistical inference for the model parameters and value functions of reinforcement learning algorithms. While most existing analyses assume random rewards to follow standard distributions, we embrace the concept of robust statistics in reinforcement learning by simultaneously addressing issues of outlier contamination and heavy-tailed rewards within a unified framework. In this paper, we develop a fully online robust policy evaluation procedure, and establish the Bahadur-type representation of our estimator. Furthermore, we develop an online procedure to efficiently conduct statistical inference based on the asymptotic distribution. This paper connects robust statistics and statistical inference in reinforcement learning, offering a more versatile and reliable approach to online policy evaluation. Finally, we validate the efficacy of our algorithm through numerical experiments conducted in simulations and real-world reinforcement learning experiments.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2310_02581
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Online Estimation and Inference for Robust Policy Evaluation in Reinforcement Learning
Liu, Weidong
Tu, Jiyuan
Chen, Xi
Zhang, Yichen
Machine Learning
Reinforcement learning has emerged as one of the prominent topics attracting attention in modern statistical learning, with policy evaluation being a key component. Unlike the traditional machine learning literature on this topic, our work emphasizes statistical inference for the model parameters and value functions of reinforcement learning algorithms. While most existing analyses assume random rewards to follow standard distributions, we embrace the concept of robust statistics in reinforcement learning by simultaneously addressing issues of outlier contamination and heavy-tailed rewards within a unified framework. In this paper, we develop a fully online robust policy evaluation procedure, and establish the Bahadur-type representation of our estimator. Furthermore, we develop an online procedure to efficiently conduct statistical inference based on the asymptotic distribution. This paper connects robust statistics and statistical inference in reinforcement learning, offering a more versatile and reliable approach to online policy evaluation. Finally, we validate the efficacy of our algorithm through numerical experiments conducted in simulations and real-world reinforcement learning experiments.
title Online Estimation and Inference for Robust Policy Evaluation in Reinforcement Learning
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.02581