10 accepted papers
Off-policy evaluation (OPE) is essential for deploying reinforcement learning in safety-critical settings, yet existing estimators such as importance sampling and doubly robust (DR) often exhibit prohibitively high variance when rewards are sparse. In this work, we introduce Reward-Shaping Control V…
The objectives that Large Language Models (LLMs) implicitly optimize remain dangerously opaque, making trustworthy alignment and auditing a grand challenge. While Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) can infer reward functions from behaviour, existing approaches either produce a single, overconfiden…
Within batch reinforcement learning, safe policy improvement seeks to ensure that the learned policy performs at least as well as the behavior policy that generated the dataset. The core challenge is seeking improvements while balancing risk when many state-action pairs may be infrequently visited.…
Mitigating shortcuts, where models exploit spurious correlations in training data, remains a significant challenge for improving generalization. Regularization methods have been proposed to address this issue by enhancing model generalizability. However, we demonstrate that these methods can sometim…
Discount regularization, using a shorter planning horizon when calculating the optimal policy, is a popular choice to restrict planning to a less complex set of policies when estimating an MDP from sparse or noisy data (Jiang et al., 2015). It is commonly understood that discount regularization func…
Concept bottleneck models (CBMs) enhance the interpretability of their predictions by first predicting high-level concepts given features, and subsequently predicting outcomes on the basis of these concepts. Recently, it was demonstrated that training the label predictor directly on the probabiliti…
Off-policy evaluation in reinforcement learning offers the chance of using observational data to improve future outcomes in domains such as healthcare and education, but safe deployment in high stakes settings requires ways of assessing its validity. Traditional measures such as confidence intervals…
Symmetry transformations induce invariances and are a crucial building block of modern machine learning algorithms. In many complex domains, such as the chemical space, invariances can be observed, yet the corresponding symmetry transformation cannot be formulated analytically. We propose to learn t…
In this work, we consider the problem of learning a hierarchical generative model of an object from a set of images which show examples of the object in the presence of variable background clutter. Existing approaches to this problem are limited by making strong a-priori assumptions about the object…
This paper considers a Bayesian view for estimating the Markov blanket of a set of query variables, where the set of potential neighbours here is big. We factorize the posterior such that the Markov blanket is conditionally independent of the network of the potential neighbours. By exploiting this…