ebalance: A Stata Package for Entropy Balancing

The Stata package ebalance implements entropy balancing, a multivariate reweighting method described in Hainmueller (2012 ) that allows users to reweight a dataset such that the covariate distributions in the reweighted data satisfy a set of specified moment conditions. This can be useful to create balanced samples in observational studies with a binary treatment where the control group data can be reweighted to match the covariate moments in the treatment group. Entropy balancing can also be used to reweight a survey sample to known characteristics from a target population

ebalance: A Stata Package for Entropy Balancing

The Stata package ebalance implements entropy balancing, a multivariate reweighting method described in Hainmueller (2012 ) that allows users to reweight a dataset such that the covariate distributions in the reweighted data satisfy a set of specified moment conditions. This can be useful to create balanced samples in observational studies with a binary treatment where the control group data can be reweighted to match the covariate moments in the treatment group. Entropy balancing can also be used to reweight a survey sample to known characteristics from a target population

Learning Reward for Physical Skills using Large Language Model

Learning reward functions for physical skills are challenging due to the vast spectrum of skills, the high-dimensionality of state and action space, and nuanced sensory feedback. The complexity of these tasks makes acquiring expert demonstration data both costly and time-consuming. Large Language Models (LLMs) contain valuable task-related knowledge that can aid in learning these reward functions. However, the direct application of LLMs for proposing reward functions has its limitations such as numerical instability and inability to incorporate the environment feedback. We aim to extract task knowledge from LLMs using environment feedback to create efficient reward functions for physical skills. Our approach consists of two components. We first use the LLM to propose features and parameterization of the reward function. Next, we update the parameters of this proposed reward function through an iterative self-alignment process. In particular, this process minimizes the ranking inconsistency between the LLM and our learned reward functions based on the new observations. We validated our method by testing it on three simulated physical skill learning tasks, demonstrating effective support for our design choices.Comment: CoRL 2023, LangRob worksho

How to Tidy Up a Table: Fusing Visual and Semantic Commonsense Reasoning for Robotic Tasks with Vague Objectives

Vague objectives in many real-life scenarios pose long-standing challenges for robotics, as defining rules, rewards, or constraints for optimization is difficult. Tasks like tidying a messy table may appear simple for humans, but articulating the criteria for tidiness is complex due to the ambiguity and flexibility in commonsense reasoning. Recent advancement in Large Language Models (LLMs) offers us an opportunity to reason over these vague objectives: learned from extensive human data, LLMs capture meaningful common sense about human behavior. However, as LLMs are trained solely on language input, they may struggle with robotic tasks due to their limited capacity to account for perception and low-level controls. In this work, we propose a simple approach to solve the task of table tidying, an example of robotic tasks with vague objectives. Specifically, the task of tidying a table involves not just clustering objects by type and functionality for semantic tidiness but also considering spatial-visual relations of objects for a visually pleasing arrangement, termed as visual tidiness. We propose to learn a lightweight, image-based tidiness score function to ground the semantically tidy policy of LLMs to achieve visual tidiness. We innovatively train the tidiness score using synthetic data gathered using random walks from a few tidy configurations. Such trajectories naturally encode the order of tidiness, thereby eliminating the need for laborious and expensive human demonstrations. Our empirical results show that our pipeline can be applied to unseen objects and complex 3D arrangements.Comment: RSSLRL2023 Worksho

Quadratic exponential BSDEs driven by a marked point process

In this paper, the well-posedness of quadratic exponential backward stochastic differential equations driven by marked point process (MPP) under unbounded terminal condition is studied based on a fixed point argument, $\theta$-method and an approximation procedure. We also prove the solvability of the mean reflected quadratic exponential backward stochastic differential equations driven by marked point process via $\theta$-method

Mean reflected BSDE driven by a marked point process and application in insurance risk management

This paper aims to solve a super-hedging problem along with insurance re-payment under running risk management constraints. The initial endowment for the super-heding problem is characterized by a class of mean reflected backward stochastic differential equation driven by a marked point process (MPP) and a Brownian motion. By Lipschitz assumptions on the generators and proper integrability on the terminal value, we give the well-posedness of this kind of BSDEs by combining a representation theorem with the fixed point argument.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2310.1472

Reflected BSDE driven by a marked point process with a convex/concave generator

In this paper, a class of reflected backward stochastic differential equations (RBSDE) driven by a marked point process (MPP) with a convex/concave generator is studied. Based on fixed point argument, $\theta$-method and truncation technique, the well-posedness of this kind of RBSDE with unbounded terminal condition and obstacle is investigated. Besides, we present an application on the pricing of American options via utility maximization, which is solved by constructing an RBSDE with a convex generator.Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:2310.1472

Panel Data Visualization in R (panelView) and Stata (panelview)

We develop an R package panelView and a Stata package panelview for panel data visualization. They are designed to assist causal analysis with panel data and have three main functionalities: (1) They plot the treatment status and missing values in a panel dataset; (2) they visualize the temporal dynamics of the main variables of interest; and (3) they depict the bivariate relationships between a treatment variable and an outcome variable either by unit or in aggregate. These tools can help researchers better understand their panel datasets before conducting statistical analysis