The adversarial stochastic shortest path problem with unknown transition probabilities
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We consider online learning in a special class of episodic Markovian decision processes, namely, loop-free stochastic shortest path problems. In this problem, an agent has to traverse through a finite directed acyclic graph with random transitions while maximizing the obtained rewards along the way. We assume that the reward function can change arbitrarily between consecutive episodes, and is entirely revealed to the agent at the end of each episode. Previous work was concerned with the case when the stochastic dynamics is known ahead of time, whereas the main novelty of this paper is that this assumption is lifted. We propose an algorithm called “follow the perturbed optimistic policy” that combines ideas from the “follow the perturbed leader” method for online learning of arbitrary sequences and “upper confidence reinforcement learning”, an algorithm for regret minimization in Markovian decision processes (with a fixed reward function). We prove that the expected cumulative regret of our algorithm is of order L|X||A| p T up to logarithmic factors, where L is the length of the longest path in the graph,X is the state space, A is the action space and T is the number of episodes. To our knowledge this is the first algorithm that learns and controls stochastic and adversarial components in an online fashion at the same time.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".