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Search: “kl-divergence”

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A Unified and Constrained View of Regularization-Based Robust Reinforcement Learning

Paper unifies regularization-based robust RL methods via new performance-gap upper bounds and jointly learned Lagrange multipliers.

The authors derive new upper bounds on the gap between nominal and worst-case deep RL policies, each expressible as an existing regularization objective plus a KL-divergence penalty. Robust training is reformulated as constrained optimization, where prior methods correspond to a fixed Lagrange multiplier. The multiplier is instead updated jointly with the policy, auto-tuning the regularization weight. Adversarial evaluations across several continuous control tasks validate the theory.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 5d agoAI research1

Likelihood-free inference with nuisance parameters through normalizing flows

Researchers decompose normalizing flows to derive near-pivotal statistics for likelihood-free inference with nuisance parameters, recovering the t-test and beating Welch limits.

A new paper decomposes neural-network normalizing flows to uncover pivotal statistics in the presence of nuisance parameters using only a sample generator from the distribution of interest. The statistic is near-pivotal in the sense of minimum average KL-divergence of its p-values and can incorporate prior knowledge of group invariances such as translation and scale. Experiments show it recovers the one-sample t-test almost exactly, outperforms the Welch test on worst-case size over a constrained variance-ratio range, and delivers higher power and much faster runtime than profile likelihood-ratio techniques on small-to-moderate samples.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 7d agoAI research

Benchmarking Qwen3.8 27B quantizations: 4-bit holds up, 1-bit collapses

Quesma benchmarks Qwen3.8 27B quantizations: 4-bit Q4_K_M matches BF16 on key benchmarks while 1-bit collapses to random chance.

Quesma spent roughly $3,000 on Modal GPUs testing Unsloth GGUF quantizations of Qwen3.8 27B across GPQA Diamond, IFBench, and Terminal-Bench 2.1. The 17 GB Q4_K_M quantization matched the 55 GB BF16 model on Terminal-Bench 2.1 and showed little degradation down to 4-bit, while the 2-bit UD-Q2_K_XL dropped noticeably. At 1-bit, scores on GPQA Diamond fell to random-guess levels, with longer reasoning making results worse, and reasoning effort settings significantly affected outcomes.