提出风险敏感强化学习新框架,发现最优策略常需混合多臂而非单臂。
Risk-sensitive Bandits: Arm Mixture Optimality and Regret-efficient Algorithms
- 用广义风险度量统一现有模型,揭示混合策略才是最优解
- 算法实现接近最优的后悔率,随时间呈 $O((\log T/T)^ν)$ 衰减
- 适合关注风险控制的金融、医疗等决策场景
本文提出一个通用的风险敏感强化学习框架,采用一类丰富的扭曲风险度量来整合风险敏感目标。该框架涵盖了多种现有风险敏感模型。一个此前未被认识到的重要发现是:对于广泛的风险度量,最优的带状算法策略涉及选择多个臂的混合组合。这与传统多臂赌博机中通常仅选择单一最优臂的做法形成鲜明对比。这一发现对算法设计产生重大影响,因为混合策略的可能性是不可数的。本文贡献包括:(i) 构建了风险敏感带状算法的通用框架;(ii) 识别出若干标准风险敏感模型中单一臂选择并非最优;(iii) 设计了后悔效率高的算法,其采样策略能准确追踪最优混合臂(当混合最优时)或单一臂(当单一最优时)。理论分析表明,这些算法的后悔率以 $O((\log T/T)^ν)$ 的形式增长,其中 $T$ 为总时间步长,$ν>0$ 为依赖于具体风险度量的常数。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
This paper introduces a general framework for risk-sensitive bandits that integrates the notions of risk-sensitive objectives by adopting a rich class of distortion riskmetrics. The introduced framework subsumes the various existing risk-sensitive models. An important and hitherto unknown observation is that for a wide range of riskmetrics, the optimal bandit policy involves selecting a mixture of arms. This is in sharp contrast to the convention in the multi-arm bandit algorithms that there is generally a solitary arm that maximizes the utility, whether purely reward-centric or risk-sensitive. This creates a major departure from the principles for designing bandit algorithms since there are uncountable mixture possibilities. The contributions of the paper are as follows: (i) it formalizes a general framework for risk-sensitive bandits, (ii) identifies standard risk-sensitive bandit models for which solitary arm selections is not optimal, (iii) and designs regret-efficient algorithms whose sampling strategies can accurately track optimal arm mixtures (when mixture is optimal) or the solitary arms (when solitary is optimal). The algorithms are shown to achieve a regret that scales according to $O((\log T/T )^ν)$, where $T$ is the horizon, and $ν>0$ is a riskmetric-specific constant.
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