paper-with-me

홈 › Papers

X4Val: Learning Neural Surrogates for Variance-Reduced Policy Evaluation

2026-06-03 · Rachel Luo, Michael Watson, Apoorva Sharma, Heng Yang, Han Qi, Edward Schmerling, Sushant Veer, Boris Ivanovic, Marco Pavone arxiv

Rigorous evaluation of learning-based robotic systems is an essential prerequisite for deployment. However, real-world test data is expensive to gather; moreover, in a typical iterative development context, data gathered from the latest policy is necessarily limited in scale. This motivates evaluation methodologies that make use of heterogeneous data sources, including simulation, historical policy logs, and data collected from related platforms or environments. While such auxiliary data are abundant and inexpensive, they are generally not directly representative of real-world outcomes -- for example, performance in simulation may differ substantially from performance in the real world -- making their principled use for high-confidence performance estimation challenging. In this paper, we introduce X4Val, a general framework for variance-reduced real-world metric estimation in the presence of non-paired, multi-domain data. X4Val embeds samples from real and auxiliary domains into a shared representation space and learns a transferable predictor of real-world metrics; this learned predictor is then incorporated into a control-variates estimator, enabling variance reduction even when paired samples are unavailable. We provide theoretical analysis and empirical evaluations on autonomous driving and real-world robot manipulation tasks, domains across which X4Val achieves up to 38.4% variance reduction and demonstrates consistent improvements over strong baselines. These results show that non-paired, heterogeneous data can be leveraged to substantially improve the sample efficiency of rigorous robotic system validation.

📄 PDF Abstract BibTeX arXiv:2606.05159

Code (0)

등록된 구현이 없습니다.

Tasks

Robot ManipulationAutonomous Driving

Similar Papers 제목 키워드 기반

ReVar: Strengthening Policy Evaluation via Reduced Variance Sampling

2022-03-09 · Subhojyoti Mukherjee, Josiah P. Hanna, Robert Nowak

This paper studies the problem of data collection for policy evaluation in Markov decision processes (MDPs). In policy evaluation, we are given a target policy and asked to estimate the expected cumulative reward it will…

PAGE-PG: A Simple and Loopless Variance-Reduced Policy Gradient Method with Probabilistic Gradient Estimation

2022-02-01 · Matilde Gargiani, Andrea Zanelli, Andrea Martinelli, Tyler Summers 외

Despite their success, policy gradient methods suffer from high variance of the gradient estimate, which can result in unsatisfactory sample complexity. Recently, numerous variance-reduced extensions of policy gradient m…

Policy Gradient Methods

Variance-Reduced Off-Policy TDC Learning: Non-Asymptotic Convergence Analysis

2020-10-26 · NeurIPS 2020 12 · Shaocong Ma, Yi Zhou, Shaofeng Zou

Variance reduction techniques have been successfully applied to temporal-difference (TD) learning and help to improve the sample complexity in policy evaluation. However, the existing work applied variance reduction to e…

Langevin Monte Carlo: random coordinate descent and variance reduction

2020-07-26 · Zhiyan Ding, Qin Li

Langevin Monte Carlo (LMC) is a popular Bayesian sampling method. For the log-concave distribution function, the method converges exponentially fast, up to a controllable discretization error. However, the method require…

Computational Efficiency

Variance-Reduced Off-Policy Memory-Efficient Policy Search

2020-09-14 · Daoming Lyu, Qi Qi, Mohammad Ghavamzadeh, Hengshuai Yao 외

Off-policy policy optimization is a challenging problem in reinforcement learning (RL). The algorithms designed for this problem often suffer from high variance in their estimators, which results in poor sample efficienc…

Reinforcement Learning (RL)Stochastic Optimization