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20172026
most citedOnline Off-policy Prediction

14 citations · 54 across the 21 of their papers we have counts for

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17 papers · 1 filter

cs.LG2026

The Minimax Rate of Perturbed Second-Order Calibration

Kamil Ciosek, Banafsheh Rafiee, Sina Ghiassian +1

Second-order calibration error quantifies how closely a higher-order predictor's epistemic-uncertainty estimate matches the conditional variance of the label probability on its lev…

cs.LG2025

Measuring Uncertainty Calibration

Kamil Ciosek, Nicolò Felicioni, Sina Ghiassian +6

We make two contributions to the problem of estimating the calibration error of a binary classifier from a finite dataset. First, we provide an upper bound for any classifier…

cs.LG2025

Hallucination Detection on a Budget: Efficient Bayesian Estimation of Semantic Entropy

Kamil Ciosek, Nicolò Felicioni, Sina Ghiassian

Detecting whether an LLM hallucinates is an important research challenge. One promising way of doing so is to estimate the semantic entropy (Farquhar et al., 2024) of the distribut…

cs.LG2024

Learning in complex action spaces without policy gradients

Arash Tavakoli, Sina Ghiassian, Nemanja Rakićević

While conventional wisdom holds that policy gradient methods are better suited to complex action spaces than action-value methods, foundational work has shown that the two paradigm…

cs.LG2024

Soft Preference Optimization: Aligning Language Models to Expert Distributions

Arsalan Sharifnassab, Saber Salehkaleybar, Sina Ghiassian +2

We propose Soft Preference Optimization (SPO), a method for aligning generative models, such as Large Language Models (LLMs), with human preferences, without the need for a reward…

cs.LG2024

On the Importance of Uncertainty in Decision-Making with Large Language Models

Nicolò Felicioni, Lucas Maystre, Sina Ghiassian +1

We investigate the role of uncertainty in decision-making problems with natural language as input. For such tasks, using Large Language Models as agents has become the norm. Howeve…

cs.LG2024★ 1 cited

In-context Exploration-Exploitation for Reinforcement Learning

Zhenwen Dai, Federico Tomasi, Sina Ghiassian

In-context learning is a promising approach for online policy learning of offline reinforcement learning (RL) methods, which can be achieved at inference time without gradient opti…

cs.LG2022

Auxiliary task discovery through generate-and-test

Banafsheh Rafiee, Sina Ghiassian, Jun Jin +3

In this paper, we explore an approach to auxiliary task discovery in reinforcement learning based on ideas from representation learning. Auxiliary tasks tend to improve data effici…

cs.LG2022★ 1 cited

Importance Sampling Placement in Off-Policy Temporal-Difference Methods

Eric Graves, Sina Ghiassian

A central challenge to applying many off-policy reinforcement learning algorithms to real world problems is the variance introduced by importance sampling. In off-policy learning,…

cs.LG2021

An Empirical Comparison of Off-policy Prediction Learning Algorithms in the Four Rooms Environment

Sina Ghiassian, Richard S. Sutton

Many off-policy prediction learning algorithms have been proposed in the past decade, but it remains unclear which algorithms learn faster than others. We empirically compare 11 of…

cs.LG2021

An Empirical Comparison of Off-policy Prediction Learning Algorithms on the Collision Task

Sina Ghiassian, Richard S. Sutton

Off-policy prediction -- learning the value function for one policy from data generated while following another policy -- is one of the most challenging subproblems in reinforcemen…

cs.LG2021★ 2 cited

A Generalized Projected Bellman Error for Off-policy Value Estimation in Reinforcement Learning

Andrew Patterson, Adam White, Martha White

Many reinforcement learning algorithms rely on value estimation, however, the most widely used algorithms -- namely temporal difference algorithms -- can diverge under both off-pol…

cs.LG2021

Does the Adam Optimizer Exacerbate Catastrophic Forgetting?

Dylan R. Ashley, Sina Ghiassian, Richard S. Sutton

Catastrophic forgetting remains a severe hindrance to the broad application of artificial neural networks (ANNs), however, it continues to be a poorly understood phenomenon. Despit…

cs.LG2020★ 9 cited

Gradient Temporal-Difference Learning with Regularized Corrections

Sina Ghiassian, Andrew Patterson, Shivam Garg +3

It is still common to use Q-learning and temporal difference (TD) learning-even though they have divergence issues and sound Gradient TD alternatives exist-because divergence seems…

cs.LG2020★ 8 cited

Improving Performance in Reinforcement Learning by Breaking Generalization in Neural Networks

Sina Ghiassian, Banafsheh Rafiee, Yat Long Lo +1

Reinforcement learning systems require good representations to work well. For decades practical success in reinforcement learning was limited to small domains. Deep reinforcement l…

cs.LG2018★ 14 cited

Online Off-policy Prediction

Sina Ghiassian, Andrew Patterson, Martha White +2

This paper investigates the problem of online prediction learning, where learning proceeds continuously as the agent interacts with an environment. The predictions made by the agen…

cs.LG2018★ 7 cited

Two geometric input transformation methods for fast online reinforcement learning with neural nets

Sina Ghiassian, Huizhen Yu, Banafsheh Rafiee +1

We apply neural nets with ReLU gates in online reinforcement learning. Our goal is to train these networks in an incremental manner, without the computationally expensive experienc…