7 papers
Beyond Expectations: Learning with Stochastic Dominance Made Practical
Shicong Cen, Jincheng Mei, Hanjun Dai +3
Stochastic dominance serves as a general framework for modeling a broad spectrum of decision preferences under uncertainty, with risk aversion as one notable example, as it natural…
Target Networks and Over-parameterization Stabilize Off-policy Bootstrapping with Function Approximation
Fengdi Che, Chenjun Xiao, Jincheng Mei +6
We prove that the combination of a target network and over-parameterized linear function approximation establishes a weaker convergence condition for bootstrapped value estimation…
Judging with Confidence: Calibrating Autoraters to Preference Distributions
Zhuohang Li, Xiaowei Li, Chengyu Huang +11
The alignment of large language models (LLMs) with human values increasingly relies on using other LLMs as automated judges, or ``autoraters''. However, their reliability is limite…
Rethinking the Global Convergence of Softmax Policy Gradient with Linear Function Approximation
Max Qiushi Lin, Jincheng Mei, Matin Aghaei +6
Policy gradient (PG) methods have played an essential role in the empirical successes of reinforcement learning. In order to handle large state-action spaces, PG methods are typica…
Representation Learning via Non-Contrastive Mutual Information
Zhaohan Daniel Guo, Bernardo Avila Pires, Khimya Khetarpal +2
Labeling data is often very time consuming and expensive, leaving us with a majority of unlabeled data. Self-supervised representation learning methods such as SimCLR (Chen et al.,…
Ordering-based Conditions for Global Convergence of Policy Gradient Methods
Jincheng Mei, Bo Dai, Alekh Agarwal +3
We prove that, for finite-arm bandits with linear function approximation, the global convergence of policy gradient (PG) methods depends on inter-related properties between the pol…