Tyler Lu

Andy Su, Jayden Ooi, Tyler Lu et al.

Delusional bias is a fundamental source of error in approximate Q-learning. To date, the only techniques that explicitly address delusion require comprehensive search using tabular value estimates. In this paper, we develop efficient methods to mitigate delusional bias by training Q-approximators with labels that are "consistent" with the underlying greedy policy class. We introduce a simple penalization scheme that encourages Q-labels used across training batches to remain (jointly) consistent with the expressible policy class. We also propose a search framework that allows multiple Q-approximators to be generated and tracked, thus mitigating the effect of premature (implicit) policy commitments. Experimental results demonstrate that these methods can improve the performance of Q-learning in a variety of Atari games, sometimes dramatically.

Ivan Vendrov, Tyler Lu, Qingqing Huang et al.

Effective techniques for eliciting user preferences have taken on added importance as recommender systems (RSs) become increasingly interactive and conversational. A common and conceptually appealing Bayesian criterion for selecting queries is expected value of information (EVOI). Unfortunately, it is computationally prohibitive to construct queries with maximum EVOI in RSs with large item spaces. We tackle this issue by introducing a continuous formulation of EVOI as a differentiable network that can be optimized using gradient methods available in modern machine learning (ML) computational frameworks (e.g., TensorFlow, PyTorch). We exploit this to develop a novel, scalable Monte Carlo method for EVOI optimization, which is more scalable for large item spaces than methods requiring explicit enumeration of items. While we emphasize the use of this approach for pairwise (or k-wise) comparisons of items, we also demonstrate how our method can be adapted to queries involving subsets of item attributes or "partial items," which are often more cognitively manageable for users. Experiments show that our gradient-based EVOI technique achieves state-of-the-art performance across several domains while scaling to large item spaces.

Tyler Lu, Martin Zinkevich, Craig Boutilier et al.

Safely exploring an unknown dynamical system is critical to the deployment of reinforcement learning (RL) in physical systems where failures may have catastrophic consequences. In scenarios where one knows little about the dynamics, diverse transition data covering relevant regions of state-action space is needed to apply either model-based or model-free RL. Motivated by the cooling of Google's data centers, we study how one can safely identify the parameters of a system model with a desired accuracy and confidence level. In particular, we focus on learning an unknown linear system with Gaussian noise assuming only that, initially, a nominal safe action is known. Define safety as satisfying specific linear constraints on the state space (e.g., requirements on process variable) that must hold over the span of an entire trajectory, and given a Probably Approximately Correct (PAC) style bound on the estimation error of model parameters, we show how to compute safe regions of action space by gradually growing a ball around the nominal safe action. One can apply any exploration strategy where actions are chosen from such safe regions. Experiments on a stylized model of data center cooling dynamics show how computing proper safe regions can increase the sample efficiency of safe exploration.