Peter Stone's Selected Publications

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Protecting Against Evaluation Overfitting in Empirical Reinforcement Learning

Protecting Against Evaluation Overfitting in Empirical Reinforcement Learning.
Shimon Whiteson, Brian Tanner, Matthew E. Taylor, and Peter Stone.
In IEEE Symposium on Adaptive Dynamic Programming and Reinforcement Learning (ADPRL), April 2011.
2011 IEEE Symposium on Adaptive Dynamic Programming and Reinforcement Learning (ADPRL)

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Abstract

Empirical evaluations play an important role in machine learning. However, the usefulness of any evaluation depends on the empirical methodology employed. Designing good empirical methodologies is difficult in part because agents can overfit test evaluations and thereby obtain misleadingly high scores. We argue that reinforcement learning is particularly vulnerable to environment overfitting and propose as a remedy generalized methodologies, in which evaluations are based on multiple environments sampled from a distribution. In addition, we consider how to summarize performance when scores from different environments may not have commensurate values. Finally, we present proof-of-concept results demonstrating how these methodologies can validate an intuitively useful range-adaptive tile coding method.

BibTeX Entry

@InProceedings{ADPRL11-shimon,
	author="Shimon Whiteson and Brian Tanner and Matthew E.\ Taylor and Peter Stone", 
	title="Protecting Against Evaluation Overfitting in Empirical Reinforcement Learning",
	booktitle="{IEEE} Symposium on Adaptive Dynamic Programming and Reinforcement Learning (ADPRL)",
	month="April",
	year="2011",
	abstract={
                  Empirical evaluations play an important role in
                  machine learning. However, the usefulness of any
                  evaluation depends on the \emph{empirical
                  methodology} employed. Designing good empirical
                  methodologies is difficult in part because agents
                  can \emph{overfit} test evaluations and thereby
                  obtain misleadingly high scores. We argue that
                  reinforcement learning is particularly vulnerable to
                  \emph{environment overfitting} and propose as a
                  remedy \emph{generalized methodologies}, in which
                  evaluations are based on multiple environments
                  sampled from a distribution. In addition, we
                  consider how to summarize performance when scores
                  from different environments may not have
                  commensurate values. Finally, we present
                  proof-of-concept results demonstrating how these
                  methodologies can validate an intuitively useful
                  range-adaptive tile coding method.
   },
   wwwnote={<a href="http://www.ieee-ssci.org/2011/adprl-2011">2011 IEEE Symposium on Adaptive Dynamic Programming and Reinforcement Learning (ADPRL)</a>},
}

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