Greedy linear value-approximation for factored Markov decision processes
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Significant recent work has focused on using linear representations to approximate value functions for factored Markov decision processes (MDPs). Current research has adopted linear programming as an effective means to calculate approximations for a given set of basis functions, tackling very large MDPs as a result. However, a number of issues remain unresolved: How accurate are the approximations produced by linear programs? How hard is it to produce better approximations? and Where do the basis functions come from? To address these questions, we first investigate the complexity of minimizing the Bellman error of a linear value function approximation—showing that this is an inherently hard problem. Nevertheless, we provide a branch and bound method for calculating Bellman error and performing approximate policy iteration for general factored MDPs. These methods are more accurate than linear programming, but more expensive. We then consider linear programming itself and investigate methods for automatically constructing sets of basis functions that allow this approach to produce good approximations. The techniques we develop are guaranteed to reduce error, but can also empirically reduce Bellman error. 1
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
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Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
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