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 quantile function


Fully Parameterized Quantile Function for Distributional Reinforcement Learning

Derek Yang, Li Zhao, Zichuan Lin, Tao Qin, Jiang Bian, Tie-Yan Liu

Neural Information Processing Systems

Distributional Reinforcement Learning (RL) differs from traditional RL in that, rather than the expectation of total returns, it estimates distributions and has achieved state-of-the-art performance on Atari Games. The key challenge in practical distributional RL algorithms lies in how to parameterize estimated distributions so as to better approximate the true continuous distribution.







8 Supplementary Material 8.1 Details and Proofs for the Proposed EOC 8.1.1 Calculation of T Given data D

Neural Information Processing Systems

Fourier transform of a power of a Euclidean distance, i.e., According to Jensen's inequality and Lipschitzness assumption, we have X According to the law of total probability and Theorem 4.1, we have P { Y A feasible solution to Equation (1) can be quickly found. Pseudocode for Algorithm 2 The pseudocode for the constrained optimization is detailed in Algorithm 2. 18 Algorithm 2 Robust Optimization Method with EOC Constraint Input: Initiate Array A of shape 2 A M that stores the max possible step. Our proposed algorithm is highly computationally efficient.



Fair Regression under Demographic Parity: A Unified Framework

Feng, Yongzhen, Wang, Weiwei, Wong, Raymond K. W., Zhang, Xianyang

arXiv.org Machine Learning

We propose a unified framework for fair regression tasks formulated as risk minimization problems subject to a demographic parity constraint. Unlike many existing approaches that are limited to specific loss functions or rely on challenging non-convex optimization, our framework is applicable to a broad spectrum of regression tasks. Examples include linear regression with squared loss, binary classification with cross-entropy loss, quantile regression with pinball loss, and robust regression with Huber loss. We derive a novel characterization of the fair risk minimizer, which yields a computationally efficient estimation procedure for general loss functions. Theoretically, we establish the asymptotic consistency of the proposed estimator and derive its convergence rates under mild assumptions. We illustrate the method's versatility through detailed discussions of several common loss functions. Numerical results demonstrate that our approach effectively minimizes risk while satisfying fairness constraints across various regression settings.


Understanding the Under-Coverage Bias in Uncertainty Estimation

Neural Information Processing Systems

Estimating the data uncertainty in regression tasks is often done by learning a quantile function or a prediction interval of the true label conditioned on the input. It is frequently observed that quantile regression---a vanilla algorithm for learning quantiles with asymptotic guarantees---tends to *under-cover* than the desired coverage level in reality. While various fixes have been proposed, a more fundamental understanding of why this under-coverage bias happens in the first place remains elusive.In this paper, we present a rigorous theoretical study on the coverage of uncertainty estimation algorithms in learning quantiles. We prove that quantile regression suffers from an inherent under-coverage bias, in a vanilla setting where we learn a realizable linear quantile function and there is more data than parameters. More quantitatively, for $\alpha> 0.5$ and small $d/n$, the $\alpha$-quantile learned by quantile regression roughly achieves coverage $\alpha - (\alpha-1/2)\cdot d/n$ regardless of the noise distribution, where $d$ is the input dimension and $n$ is the number of training data. Our theory reveals that this under-coverage bias stems from a certain high-dimensional parameter estimation error that is not implied by existing theories on quantile regression. Experiments on simulated and real data verify our theory and further illustrate the effect of various factors such as sample size and model capacity on the under-coverage bias in more practical setups.