Heuristic Pathologies and Further Variance Reduction via Uncertainty Propagation in the AIVAT Family of Techniques

ArXi:2605.14261v1 Announce Type: new How should an agent's performance in a multiagent environment be evaluated when there is a limited sample size or a high cost of running a trial? The AIVAT family of variance reduction techniques was proposed to address this challenge by In our first contribution, we parameterize the heuristic value function to highlight AIVAT's potential vulnerabilities: a) the sample variance can be set pathologically low by directly applying gradient descent on the sample variance, and b) one can p-hack to draw a desired statistical.