Bastani, Osbert

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Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
  • Publication
    Exploring with Sticky Mittens: Reinforcement Learning with Expert Interventions via Option Templates
    (2022-11-17) Dutta, Souradeep; Sridhar, Kaustubh; Bastani, Osbert; Dobriban, Edgar; Weimer, James; Parish-Morris, Julia
    Long horizon robot learning tasks with sparse rewards pose a significant challenge for current reinforcement learning algorithms. A key feature enabling humans to learn challenging control tasks is that they often receive expert intervention that enables them to understand the high-level structure of the task before mastering low-level control actions. We propose a framework for leveraging expert intervention to solve long-horizon reinforcement learning tasks. We consider option templates, which are specifications encoding a potential option that can be trained using reinforcement learning. We formulate expert intervention as allowing the agent to execute option templates before learning an implementation. This enables them to use an option, before committing costly resources to learning it. We evaluate our approach on three challenging reinforcement learning problems, showing that it outperforms state-of-the-art approaches by two orders of magnitude.
  • Publication
    PAC Confidence Sets for Deep Neural Networks via Calibrated Prediction
    (2020-02-01) Park, Sangdon; Bastani, Osbert; Matni, Nikolai; Lee, Insup
    We propose an algorithm combining calibrated prediction and generalization bounds from learning theory to construct confidence sets for deep neural networks with PAC guarantees---i.e., the confidence set for a given input contains the true label with high probability. We demonstrate how our approach can be used to construct PAC confidence sets on ResNet for ImageNet, a visual object tracking model, and a dynamics model for the half-cheetah reinforcement learning problem.
  • Publication
    Calibrated Prediction with Covariate Shift via Unsupervised Domain Adaptation
    (2020-03-01) Park, Sangdon; Bastani, Osbert; Weimer, James; Lee, Insup
    Reliable uncertainty estimates are an important tool for helping autonomous agents or human decision makers understand and leverage predictive models. However, existing approaches to estimating uncertainty largely ignore the possibility of covariate shift—i.e., where the real-world data distribution may differ from the training distribution. As a consequence, existing algorithms can overestimate certainty, possibly yielding a false sense of confidence in the predictive model. We propose an algorithm for calibrating predictions that accounts for the possibility of covariate shift, given labeled examples from the training distribution and unlabeled examples from the real-world distribution. Our algorithm uses importance weighting to correct for the shift from the training to the real-world distribution. However, importance weighting relies on the training and real-world distributions to be sufficiently close. Building on ideas from domain adaptation, we additionally learn a feature map that tries to equalize these two distributions. In an empirical evaluation, we show that our proposed approach outperforms existing approaches to calibrated prediction when there is covariate shift.