针对大规模动作空间的强化学习,提出高效探索与稳定估计的新方法。
On-Policy and Off-Policy Learning for Large Action Spaces

- 用混合效应和扩散先验建模动作关联,提升小样本下的策略学习效率
- 发现优化误差在大动作空间中常主导估计误差,提出可高效优化的目标函数
- 结合指数平滑与概率边界,控制重要性采样中的偏差-方差权衡,适合工业级推荐系统
本论文研究交互系统中智能体从超大动作集中选择行为并获得部分反馈的策略学习问题。核心框架为上下文无关的多臂老虎机,分两种范式:在线学习(on-policy)中,智能体与环境序列交互以最小化累积损失;离线学习(off-policy)中,基于由其他策略收集的记录数据进行学习。在大规模动作空间下,两者均面临探索低效、数据稀疏、重要性权重方差高、外推偏差及优化困难等挑战。第一部分提出结构化贝叶斯方法:meTS 是汤普森采样的混合效应扩展,dTS 则采用受扩散启发的先验来建模动作间的依赖关系,二者通过共享动作间信息,实现依赖于有效动作数的后悔上界。第二部分针对离线学习,提出基于潜在变量的结构化直接方法(sDM),揭示优化误差在大动作空间中常超过估计误差,并设计出凹的、可高效优化的策略加权对数似然目标。最后,开发基于指数平滑和 PAC-Bayesian 边界的可微悲观方法,用于控制正则化重要性采样估计器的偏差-方差平衡。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
This thesis studies policy learning in interactive systems where an agent observes a context, selects an action from a very large set, and receives partial feedback. The main framework is contextual bandits, with two paradigms: on-policy learning, where the agent interacts sequentially with the environment and minimizes regret, and off-policy learning, where it learns from logged data collected by a logging policy. In large action spaces, both settings face major challenges: inefficient exploration, sparse data coverage, high-variance importance weights, extrapolation bias, and difficult optimization landscapes. The first part develops structured Bayesian methods for on-policy learning. We introduce meTS, a mixed-effect extension of Thompson sampling, and dTS, which leverages diffusion-inspired priors to model dependencies between actions. These methods share information across actions and yield regret guarantees depending on an effective number of actions. The second part addresses off-policy learning. We propose sDM, a structured direct method based on latent variables, show that optimization error can dominate estimation error in large action spaces, and introduce concave, efficiently optimizable policy-weighted log-likelihood objectives. Finally, we develop differentiable pessimistic methods based on exponential smoothing and PAC-Bayesian bounds to control the bias-variance trade-off of regularized importance-sampling estimators.
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