{"id":481206,"date":"2018-04-20T10:44:15","date_gmt":"2018-04-20T17:44:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/?post_type=msr-research-item&p=481206"},"modified":"2018-10-16T22:27:27","modified_gmt":"2018-10-17T05:27:27","slug":"residual-loss-prediction-reinforcement-learning-no-incremental-feedback","status":"publish","type":"msr-research-item","link":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/publication\/residual-loss-prediction-reinforcement-learning-no-incremental-feedback\/","title":{"rendered":"Residual Loss Prediction: Reinforcement Learning with no Incremental Feedback"},"content":{"rendered":"
We consider reinforcement learning and bandit structured prediction problems with very sparse loss feedback: only at the end of an episode. We introduce a novel algorithm, RESIDUAL LOSS PREDICTION (RESLOPE), that solves such problems by automatically learning an internal representation of a denser reward function. RESLOPE operates as a reduction to contextual bandits, using its learned loss representation to solve the credit assignment problem, and a contextual bandit oracle to trade-off exploration and exploitation. RESLOPE enjoys a no-regret reduction-style theoretical guarantee and outperforms state of the art reinforcement learning algorithms in both MDP environments and bandit structured prediction settings.<\/span><\/div>\n
TL;DR: <\/span>We present a novel algorithm for solving reinforcement learning and bandit structured prediction problems with very sparse loss feedback.<\/span><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We consider reinforcement learning and bandit structured prediction problems with very sparse loss feedback: only at the end of an episode. We introduce a novel algorithm, RESIDUAL LOSS PREDICTION (RESLOPE), that solves such problems by automatically learning an internal representation of a denser reward function. RESLOPE operates as a reduction to contextual bandits, using its […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":0,"template":"","meta":{"msr-url-field":"","msr-podcast-episode":"","msrModifiedDate":"","msrModifiedDateEnabled":false,"ep_exclude_from_search":false,"footnotes":""},"msr-content-type":[3],"msr-research-highlight":[],"research-area":[13556],"msr-publication-type":[193716],"msr-product-type":[],"msr-focus-area":[],"msr-platform":[],"msr-download-source":[],"msr-locale":[268875],"msr-field-of-study":[],"msr-conference":[],"msr-journal":[],"msr-impact-theme":[],"msr-pillar":[],"class_list":["post-481206","msr-research-item","type-msr-research-item","status-publish","hentry","msr-research-area-artificial-intelligence","msr-locale-en_us"],"msr_publishername":"","msr_edition":"ICLR 2018 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