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Estimating value functions is a core component of reinforcement learning algorithms. Temporal difference (TD) learning algorithms use bootstrapping, i.e. they update the value function toward a learning target using value estimates at subsequent time-steps. Alternatively, the value function can be updated toward a learning target constructed by separately predicting successor features (SF)â€”a policy-dependent modelâ€”and linearly combining them with instantaneous rewards. 
 
We focus on bootstrapping targets used when estimating value functions, and propose a new backup target, the ?-return mixture, which implicitly combines value-predictive knowledge (used by TD methods) with (successor) feature-predictive knowledgeâ€”with a parameter ? capturing how much to rely on each. We illustrate that incorporating predictive knowledge through an ??-discounted SF model makes more efficient use of sampled experience, compared to either extreme, i.e. bootstrapping entirely on the value function estimate, or bootstrapping on the product of separately estimated successor features and instantaneous reward models. We empirically show this approach leads to faster policy evaluation and better control performance, for tabular and nonlinear function approximations, indicating scalability and generality.

AAAI 2022

A Generalized Bootstrap Target for Value-Learning, Efficiently Combining Value and Feature Predictions

It is my great pleasure and honor to welcome you to the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026), held in San Diego, California, USA, July 2–7, 2026. ACL 2026 continues our fields tradition of excellence in scholarship, innovation, and inclusivity, and I am deeply grateful to the many volunteers who have worked tirelessly to bring this event to life.

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ACL 2026

The 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026) will take place in San Diego, California, from July 2 - 7, 2026.

technical paper

The purpose of the AAAI conference is to promote research in artificial intelligence (AI) and scientific exchange among AI researchers, practitioners, scientists, and engineers in affiliated disciplines. 

Many active learning and search approaches are intractable for large-scale industrial settings with billions of unlabeled examples. Existing approaches search globally for the optimal examples to label, scaling linearly or even quadratically with the unlabeled data. In this paper, we improve the computational efficiency of active learning and search methods by restricting the candidate pool for labeling to the nearest neighbors of the currently labeled set instead of scanning over all of the unlabeled data. We evaluate several selection strategies in this setting on three large-scale computer vision datasets: ImageNet, OpenImages, and a de-identified and aggregated dataset of 10 billion publicly shared images provided by a large internet company. Our approach achieved similar mAP and recall as the traditional global approach while reducing the computational cost of selection by up to three orders of magnitude, enabling web-scale active learning.

Similarity Search for Efficient Active Learning and Search of Rare Concepts

It is of significance for an agent to autonomously explore the environment and learn a widely applicable and general-purpose goal-conditioned policy that can achieve diverse goals including images and text descriptions. Considering such perceptually-specific goals, one natural approach is to reward the agent with a prior non-parametric distance over the embedding spaces of states and goals. However, this may be infeasible in some situations, either because it is unclear how to choose suitable measurement, or because embedding (heterogeneous) goals and states is non-trivial. The key insight of this work is that we introduce a latent-conditioned policy to provide goals and intrinsic rewards for learning the goal-conditioned policy. As opposed to directly scoring current states with regards to goals, we obtain rewards by scoring current states with associated latent variables. We theoretically characterize the connection between our unsupervised objective and the multi-goal setting, and empirically demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method which substantially outperforms prior techniques in a variety of tasks.

Learn Goal-Conditioned Policy with Intrinsic Motivation for Deep Reinforcement Learning

The conventional wisdom behind learning deep classification models is to focus on bad-classified examples and ignore well-classified examples that are far from the decision boundary. For instance, when training with cross-entropy loss, examples with higher likelihoods (i.e., well-classified examples) contribute smaller gradients in back-propagation. However, we theoretically show that this common practice hinders representation learning, energy optimization, and margin growth. To counteract this deficiency, we propose to reward well-classified examples with additive bonuses to revive their contribution to the learning process. This counterexample theoretically addresses these three issues. We empirically support this claim by directly verifying the theoretical results or significant performance improvement with our counterexample on diverse tasks, including image classification, graph classification, and machine translation. Furthermore, this paper shows that we can deal with complex scenarios, such as imbalanced classification, OOD detection, and applications under adversarial attacks because our idea can solve these three issues. Code is available at https://github.com/lancopku/well-classified-examples-are-underestimated.

Well-Classified Examples are Underestimated in Classification with Deep Neural Networks

Many physical phenomena are described by Hamiltonian mechanics using an energy function (Hamiltonian). Recently, the Hamiltonian neural network, which approximates the Hamiltonian by a neural network, and its extensions have attracted much attention. This is a very powerful method, but theoretical studies are limited. In this study, by combining the statistical learning theory and KAM theory, we provide a theoretical analysis of the behavior of Hamiltonian neural networks when the learning error is not completely zero. A Hamiltonian neural network with non-zero errors can be considered as a perturbation from the true dynamics, and the perturbation theory of the Hamilton equation is widely known as KAM theory. To apply KAM theory, we provide a generalization error bound for Hamiltonian neural networks by deriving an estimate of the covering number of the gradient of the multi-layer perceptron, which is the key ingredient of the model. This error bound gives a sup-norm bound on the Hamiltonian that is required in the application of KAM theory.

KAM Theory Meets Statistical Learning Theory: Hamiltonian Neural Networks with Non-Zero Training Loss

Controllers for autonomous systems that operate in safety-critical settings must account for stochastic disturbances. Such disturbances are often modeled as process noise, and common assumptions are that the underlying distributions are known and/or Gaussian. In practice, however, these assumptions may be unrealistic and can lead to poor approximations of the true noise distribution. We present a novel planning method that does not rely on any explicit representation of the noise distributions. In particular, we address the problem of computing a controller that provides probabilistic guarantees on safely reaching a target. First, we abstract the continuous system into a discrete-state model that captures noise by probabilistic transitions between states. As a key contribution, we adapt tools from the scenario approach to compute probably approximately correct (PAC) bounds on these transition probabilities, based on a finite number of samples of the noise. We capture these bounds in the transition probability intervals of a so-called interval Markov decision process (iMDP). This iMDP is robust against uncertainty in the transition probabilities, and the tightness of the probability intervals can be controlled through the number of samples. We use state-of-the-art verification techniques to provide guarantees on the iMDP, and compute a controller for which these guarantees carry over to the autonomous system. Realistic benchmarks show the practical applicability of our method, even when the iMDP has millions of states or transitions.

Sampling-Based Robust Control of Autonomous Systems with Non-Gaussian Noise

The modeling and control of complex physical systems are essential in real-world problems. We propose a novel framework that is generally applicable to solving PDE-constrained optimal control problems by introducing surrogate models for PDE solution operators with special regularizers. The procedure of the proposed framework is divided into two phases: solution operator learning for PDE constraints (Phase 1) and searching for optimal control (Phase 2). Once the surrogate model is trained in Phase 1, the optimal control can be inferred in Phase 2 without intensive computations. Our framework can be applied to both data-driven and data-free cases. We demonstrate the successful application of our method to various optimal control problems for different control variables with diverse PDE constraints from the Poisson equation to Burgers' equation.

Solving PDE-Constrained Control Problems using Operator Learning

Many efforts have been made for revealing the decision-making process of black-box learning machines such as deep neural networks, resulting in useful local and global explanation methods. For local explanation, stochasticity is known to help: a simple method, called SmoothGrad, has improved the visual quality of gradient-based attribution by adding noise to the input space and averaging the explanations of the noisy inputs. In this paper, we extend this idea and propose NoiseGrad that enhances both local and global explanation methods. Specifically, NoiseGrad introduces stochasticity in the weight parameter space, such that the decision boundary is perturbed. NoiseGrad is expected to enhance the local explanation, similarly to SmoothGrad, due to the dual relationship between the input perturbation and the decision boundary perturbation. We evaluate NoiseGrad and its fusion with SmoothGrad - FusionGrad - qualitatively and quantitatively with several evaluation criteria, and show that our novel approach significantly outperforms the baseline methods. Both NoiseGrad and FusionGrad are method-agnostic and as handy as SmoothGrad using a simple heuristic for the choice of the hyperparameter setting without the need of fine-tuning.

NoiseGrad — Enhancing Explanationsby Introducing Stochasticity to Model Weights

We present a novel approach to hierarchical reinforcement learning for linearly-solvable Markov decision processes. Our approach assumes that the state space is partitioned, and defines subtasks for moving between the partitions. We represent value functions on several levels of abstraction, and use the compositionality of subtasks to estimate the optimal values of the states in each partition. The policy is implicitly defined on these optimal value estimates, rather than being decomposed among the subtasks. As a consequence, our approach can learn the globally optimal policy, and does not suffer from non-stationarities induced by high-level decisions. If several partitions have equivalent dynamics, the subtasks of those partitions can be shared. We show that our approach is significantly more sample efficient than that of a flat learner and similar hierarchical approaches when the set of boundary states is smaller than the entire state space.

Globally Optimal Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning for Linearly-Solvable Markov Decision Processes

Reward-Weighted Regression (RWR) belongs to a family of widely known iterative Reinforcement Learning algorithms based on the Expectation-Maximization framework. In this family, learning at each iteration consists of sampling a batch of trajectories using the current policy and fitting a new policy to maximize a return-weighted log-likelihood of actions. Although RWR is known to yield monotonic improvement of the policy under certain circumstances, whether and under which conditions RWR converges to the optimal policy have remained open questions. In this paper, we provide for the first time a proof that RWR converges to a global optimum when no function approximation is used, in a general compact setting. Furthermore, for the simpler case with finite state and action spaces we prove R-linear convergence of the state-value function to the optimum.

Reward-Weighted Regression Converges to a Global Optimum

As neural network classifiers are deployed in real-world applications, it is crucial that their failures can be detected reliably. One practical solution is to assign confidence scores to each prediction, then use these scores to filter out possible misclassifications. However, existing confidence metrics are not yet sufficiently reliable for this role. This paper presents a new framework that produces a quantitative metric for detecting misclassification errors. This framework, RED, builds an error detector on top of the base classifier and estimates uncertainty of the detection scores using Gaussian Processes. Experimental comparisons with other error detection methods on 125 UCI datasets demonstrate that this approach is effective. Further implementations on two probabilistic base classifiers and two large deep learning architecture in vision tasks further confirm that the method is robust and scalable. Third, an empirical analysis of RED with out-of-distribution and adversarial samples shows that the method can be used not only to detect errors but also to understand where they come from. RED can thereby be used to improve trustworthiness of neural network classifiers more broadly in the future.

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Similarity Search for Efficient Active Learning and Search of Rare Concepts

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Next from AAAI 2022

Similarity Search for Efficient Active Learning and Search of Rare Concepts

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Evolutionary Guided Decoding: Iterative Value Refinement for LLMs

Stay up to date with the latest Underline news!

PRESENTATIONS

CONFERENCES

COMPANY

RESOURCES

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