Consider the following instance of the Offline Meta Reinforcement Learning (OMRL) problem: given the complete training logs of N conventional RL agents, trained on N different tasks, design a meta-agent that can quickly maximize reward in a new, unseen task from the same task distribution. In particular, while each conventional RL agent explored and exploited its own different task, the meta-agent must identify regularities in the data that lead to effective exploration/exploitation in the unseen task. Here, we take a Bayesian RL (BRL) view, and seek to learn a Bayes-optimal policy from the offline data. Building on the recent VariBAD BRL approach, we develop an off-policy BRL method that learns to plan an exploration strategy based on an adaptive neural belief estimate. However, learning to infer such a belief from offline data brings a new identifiability issue we term MDP ambiguity. We characterize the problem, and suggest resolutions via data collection and modification procedures. Finally, we evaluate our framework on a diverse set of domains, including difficult sparse reward tasks, and demonstrate learning of effective exploration behavior that is qualitatively different from the exploration used by any RL agent in the data. Our code is available online at https://github.com/Rondorf/BOReL.

X. Without loss of generality, we assume S(B) = S Hence, to prove Theorem 1, it is sufficient to show that S(B) = S(Σ) holds. To verify S(B) = S(Σ), we only need to show the following two results hold: (I). We now begin with the statement (I). This completes the proof for Statement I. We then turn to Statement II. This leads to a contradiction with (H.2) where the structure dimension is r.

We investigate the degree to which our conditional independence assumption is satisfied empirically in the datasets used in the paper. Specifically, of interest is the assumption of conditional independence of m(x) and h(x), given y. Assessing conditional independence is not straightforward given that m(x) is a K-dimensional real-valued vector and h(x) and y each take one of K categorical values, with K = 10 for CIFAR-10H and K = 16 for ImageNet-16H. While there exist statistical tests for assessing conditional independence for categorical random variables, with real-valued variables the situation is less straightforward and there are multiple options such as different non-parametric tests involving different tradeoffs [Runge, 2018, Marx and Vreeken, 2019, Mukherjee et al., 2020, Berrett et al., 2020]. Given these issues we investigate the degree of conditional dependence using two relatively simple approaches.

An increasingly common use case for machine learning models is augmenting the abilities of human decision makers. For classification tasks where neither the human nor model are perfectly accurate, a key step in obtaining high performance is combining their individual predictions in a manner that leverages their relative strengths. In this work, we develop a set of algorithms that combine the probabilistic output of a model with the class-level output of a human. We show theoretically that the accuracy of our combination model is driven not only by the individual human and model accuracies, but also by the model's confidence. Empirical results on image classification with CIFAR-10 and a subset of ImageNet demonstrate that such human-model combinations consistently have higher accuracies than the model or human alone, and that the parameters of the combination method can be estimated effectively with as few as ten labeled datapoints.

This paper investigates fairness and bias in Canonical Correlation Analysis (CCA), a widely used statistical technique for examining the relationship between two sets of variables. We present a framework that alleviates unfairness by minimizing the correlation disparity error associated with protected attributes. Our approach enables CCA to learn global projection matrices from all data points while ensuring that these matrices yield comparable correlation levels to group-specific projection matrices. Experimental evaluation on both synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrates the efficacy of our method in reducing correlation disparity error without compromising CCA accuracy.